From trade discipline to geopolitical signalling: The reconfiguration of tariffs in contemporary global trade

Abstract

This paper explores the reconfiguration of tariffs from economic policy instruments disciplined by the multilateral trading system to expressive tools of geopolitical signalling in the current global order, a shift most visibly driven by recent US practice but with broader systemic implications. It interrogates how, in the wake of renewed geopolitical tensions and the erosion of multilateralism, tariffs have transcended their traditional role as mechanisms of market correction and protection to become instruments of narrative projection, diplomatic assertion, and legal exception. Drawing on international trade history and discourse analysis, the paper first traces the transformation of tariff functions from the post-war General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) framework—built around predictability, transparency, and progressive liberalisation—towards their resurgence as strategic levers of statecraft. States now deploy tariffs not solely to shield domestic sectors, but to articulate sovereignty claims, discipline rivals, and project ideological alignment. Although this expressive turn has been most pronounced in the US, its effects reverberate across the system by reshaping trade expectations and policy strategies. The paper also examines the performative role of tariff announcements and their surrounding rituals, through which states stage and display their sovereignty to both domestic and international audiences. It will also explain how tariffs, being performative, are simultaneously narrative: they exert their impact by telling formally structured legal stories, irrespective of their empirical persuasiveness. This paper also conceptualises tariff signalling through three functions: compellence, deterrence, and reassurance, demonstrating how calibrated escalation, suspension, and exemption operate as instruments of rivalry management within a formal grammar of trade law legality. Crucially, these dynamics unfold within the legal framework of the WTO While the multilateral trading system disciplines tariffs through binding commitments and narrowly tailored exceptions, the invocation of these exceptions also carries expressive force. Security, public morals, and resilience narratives supply juridical vocabularies through which deviation is framed as lawful. The contrast between adjudicatory scrutiny and political justification reveals the dual life of trade law: a structure of constraint and a stage for sovereign performance. Ultimately, the paper contends that the current resurgence of tariffs marks neither a simple return to classical protectionism nor a temporary rhetorical aberration, but the consolidation of an expressive logic, whereby tariffs are used to project identity and geopolitical resolve within a contested multilateral order. Recognising this dynamic is essential for understanding the evolving relationship between sovereignty and legality in contemporary global trade.