The article explores the decline of the term 'friendshoring,' which gained popularity during the early phases of the 'cold war 2.0' as a way to describe shifting supply chains towards trusted allies. Analyzing its origins, longevity, and eventual vulnerability, the piece highlights how the word's association with 'friend,' a concept fraught with complexity in international relations, ultimately contributed to its downfall.
Brain rot, brat, bro-caster. All told, 2024 delivered a good crop of word-of-the-year fodder: the annual digest of what newborn vocabulary tells us about the year we are leaving behind and what we became in its clutches. Just as revealing are the funerals: for words that either quietly perished or are entering 2025 at death’s door, seeping relevance from some fatal wound.
“Friendshoring”, after a bruising 12 months and the ugly, eviscerating saga around Nippon Steel’s takeover bid for US Steel, cannot be much longer for this world. Some will contend that friendshoring — the concept of rerouting supply chains through countries perceived as long-term reliable allies — was too buzzy for longevity. Others will argue that the word was so cynically crafted to disguise a with-us-or-against-us bloc formation, that it would always have been replaced with something grittier. Still, for a few years, the phrase thrived as the rhetorical comeback to deglobalisation — exuding warmth in the early phase of cold war 2.0. It was a term born of crisis and disruption: first from the pandemic, then from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and, above all, from the deepening consensus that US-China antagonism was permanent. It was also a distinctive thing of the Biden administration. In 2022, US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen prominently used the word when setting out America’s new approach to trade. The US, she said, should favour reliance on countries that provoked no geopolitical worries for Washington, or which strongly adhered to a shared set of norms and values. Countries, she did not even need to say, like Japan. The vulnerability of friendshoring, as a word, lies in America’s historic relationship with the word “friend”. In both diplomatic and business circles, many are fond of a quote attributed to Henry Kissinger. The cold war
Friendshoring Globalization Geopolitics Supply Chains International Relations
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