Mihir Sharma, Columnist

Why US Tariffs Failed to Dent Global Trade

January 5, 2026 at 7:00 PM UTC

Corrected

January 5, 2026 at 10:47 PM UTC

Mihir Sharma is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A senior fellow at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, he is author of “Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.”

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Last year was supposed to mark the moment international trade was dismantled. President Donald Trump’s tariffs, we were told, were so unprecedented in scale and ambition that they might stop globalization in its tracks.

Yet here we are in 2026, and the spreadsheets stubbornly refuse to tell the same story. According to the latest data from the UN’s trade and development body, UNCTAD, in 2025 the value of global trade likely crossed $35 trillion for the first time in history. That’s 7% more than the previous year.