The Tariff War Isn’t Won at the Border

When the geopolitical landscape shifts overnight, most negotiations grind to a halt. Yet, the savviest dealmakers don’t just survive these disruptions — they use them to build stronger, more resilient agreements.

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April 2025. The U.S. administration announces new tariffs on a broad category of products. In the days that follow, thousands of negotiations unfolding worldwide come to a standstill. Emails go unanswered, meetings are postponed, contacts become unreachable.

Yet at some tables, something different happens. Negotiations don’t stall. They reopen on new foundations, and in certain cases, produce better deals than the ones about to be signed before the shock.

What’s different about those tables?

In this article, we’ll explore:

• Why you don’t need to be an economist to adapt to a shifting landscape
• How an external shock reshapes the interests of both parties
• Why adapting means more than just changing what you say at the table
• How to build agreements that hold up under uncertainty instead of breaking at every new headline

You don’t need to understand everything about tariffs. You need to understand people.

The First Trap of a Turbulent Context

When the environment gets rocky, the first trap we fall into is thinking that to negotiate well, we first need to understand everything happening outside. The tariffs, the counter-tariffs, the WTO talks, Brussels’ response.

That’s not the case.

Your job isn’t to solve the trade war between the U.S. and the EU. Your job is to understand how that external context has changed the specific situation of the two parties sitting at your table. These are two completely different tasks.

An economist studies global flows. A negotiator studies the people in front of them: what they really want, how much pressure they’re under, what alternatives they have.

When an external shock hits — tariffs, sanctions, trade barriers, sudden inflation — the first thing to do is stop and ask three questions: How has the counterpart’s situation changed? How has mine changed? Are there new opportunities that didn’t exist before?

What Really Changes

An external shock doesn’t just change the numbers. It changes interests, shifts power dynamics, and alters urgency.

Interests Shift

Before tariffs, an American importer of Italian wine negotiated mainly on price and volume. After tariffs, price almost becomes a secondary issue. Their real problem becomes deciding whether and how to keep operating in that market, how to explain a sudden price hike to their customers, how to protect a positioning built over years.

On the other side, the Italian producer isn’t just trying to protect their margins. They want to know if they can still count on that distribution channel for the next three years. They need certainty, not just a good price today.

When interests shift like this, negotiating only on price becomes misleading. You argue over a number while the real problems — the survival of the channel, the stability of the relationship, the sharing of risk — remain unresolved under the table.

Power Dynamics Are Redrawn

Tariffs don’t hit both sides equally. Some counterparts are overwhelmed by the external shock: they lose markets, see the value of their alternatives collapse, find themselves under immediate pressure. Others, meanwhile, discover they’re in a surprisingly strong position — maybe they produce in a country not affected by tariffs, or they have production capacity competitors lack.

Understanding which side is in more trouble — without flaunting it arrogantly — is valuable information. It tells you how much room there is to ask for things, and how urgent it is to close.

Uncertainty Becomes a Variable to Negotiate

Before, parties discussed known conditions: market prices, production costs, delivery timelines. Now there’s a new, dominant variable: nobody knows how this will end. Tariffs could rise further. They could be withdrawn. They could shift industries.

This uncertainty, if left unaddressed at the table, paralyzes negotiations. But if it’s named and treated as a variable to manage together, it becomes a lever.

How to Adapt, Practically

There’s a common temptation: thinking that it’s enough to tweak something in what you say at the table. In reality, negotiations that unblock after a shock like tariffs almost always operate on three levels together — and it’s rare that intervening on just one is enough.

Rearranging the Room

The less obvious, but often more useful, question isn’t “What do I say differently?” but “Am I talking to the right people about the right things?”

An external shock like tariffs changes who has an interest in being at the table and what makes sense to put on the agenda. Maybe the negotiation you were having with a client’s purchasing department should be expanded to include someone from finance, because the problem has become a cash-flow issue before a pricing one. Maybe a supplier you never considered a viable alternative now is one, and simply exploring that — openly, without needing to reach a deal — changes the dynamic of the main negotiation. Maybe there are trade associations, public guarantee instruments, or logistics intermediaries that can be brought in to reshape the possible agreement.

Rearranging the room means asking: Who needs to be in this room? What do we actually need to talk about? Is this still the right negotiation, or do we need a different one?

Not a Price, But a Mechanism

When the context is unstable, negotiating a fixed price for three years is often a mistake. Not because it’s impossible, but because it’s an agreement both sides already know probably won’t hold. One side will come back to renegotiate, with all the relational and operational costs that brings.

The alternative is to build agreements that explicitly include adaptation mechanisms. As noted by ICC Italy, there are contractual tools designed precisely for this:

• Hardship clauses, which allow renegotiation if conditions change extraordinarily
• Price adjustment clauses, which tie the price to the movement of an external variable (like the tariffs themselves)
• Cost-sharing clauses, which pre-establish how unexpected costs are split between the parties

These tools aren’t exotic or reserved for multinationals. They’re contract techniques accessible to any commercial agreement, and they become especially valuable when both sides know they can’t predict how the next year will go.

The point isn’t who “wins” the uncertainty, but how the two parties decide to share it. An agreement that distributes risk fairly and transparently is far more robust than one where one side took it all hoping things would go well.

Getting Back to the People

The effects of the shock show up at the table — but that’s also where the solutions are found, if you’re willing to abandon positions and return to interests.

The temptation, under pressure, is to dig into a position (“I can’t accept a price lower than X”) and wait for the counterpart to cave. That almost always leads to an impasse. The opposite move is to ask yourself — and ask the counterpart — what they’re really looking for now that the context has changed.

Let’s go back to the wine example. If the Italian producer understands that their American importer is afraid of losing the premium customers they’ve built over years, they can offer something beyond price: a multi-year deal with exclusivity in certain markets, a shared communication campaign to explain the price increase, a flexible mechanism to adjust volumes. They give something on today’s price, but gain continuity in the relationship over time. The importer gets the certainty they’re looking for, not just a better number.

Understanding Who’s in More of a Rush to Close

There’s a second, less obvious layer: understanding which of the two sides needs to close more — and which can afford to wait.

This isn’t about calculating a walk-away point like it’s a certain number (it rarely is, and leaning too hard on that certainty can become a trap). It’s about reading the landscape of pressures you’re both in. A supplier who lost 40% of their export business overnight is in a different position than one who found new outlets in Asia. An importer who promised product continuity to premium customers has different needs than one who was already considering alternatives. Understanding this is useful information — not to exploit it, but to build an agreement that truly holds.

Final Reflection

There’s something the tariff war has made clear, beyond specific industries or types of negotiation.

Moments of external instability reveal who had truly prepared for the negotiation — and who had only prepared for the stable context they knew.

Those who had done the work of understanding the counterpart’s deep interests, not just their stated positions, find themselves making a few adjustments but know where to pick up. Those who had learned to build flexible agreements instead of rigid ones find themselves making a phone call to their counterpart, not starting from scratch.

And those who had the habit of asking, before every negotiation, who needs to be at the table and what should really be on the agenda, realize that even an external shock is ultimately a question of this kind: the world has changed something, and it’s up to us to decide how to rearrange the room.

The tariff is decided by someone else. How we sit at the table — that’s on us.