When friendliness and like-mindedness do not matter anymore

In a previous post, I covered the fact that the Biden administration wanted to “friend-shore” the US trade and work with “friendly” and “like-minded” countries.

The new Trump administration seems not to care too much about these notions of friendliness and like-mindedness. Indeed, the tariff announcements are made to geopolitical allies and rivals in an indiscriminate way, as noted by the Economist in this article.

Some evidence of “friendshoring” is found, but no evidence of “near shoring” reports The Economist:

To understand the geopolitical distance, we can mention that 3.1 is the geopolitical distance between the US and Turkey or between Tunisia and China.

How will tariff announcements impact geopolitical and geographical trade distance? Time will tell.

I recommend the reading of the following two articles:

Oriola, H., & Saadaoui, J. (2025). Exchange rate reaction to international organization loans and geopolitical preferences. Economics Letters, 112212,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econlet.2025.112212.

Aiyar, S., Malacrino, D., & Presbitero, A. F. (2024). Investing in friends: The role of geopolitical alignment in FDI flows. European Journal of Political Economy83, 102508. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2024.102508.

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