For much of the post–Cold War era, access to the American market was treated by European firms as a structural constant – vast, rules-based, and largely insulated from political turbulence. Companies competed on price, quality, branding, and logistics, confident that Washington might grumble about trade imbalances but would ultimately defend an open commercial order. That assumption has quietly expired. What has replaced it is not protectionism in the crude, 1930s sense, but something more subtle and more disruptive: the American market is increasingly treated as a strategic asset, to be rationed, conditioned, and leveraged in pursuit of national objectives.
American officials are unusually candid about this shift. Jamieson Greer, the US Trade Representative, has argued that “for decades, American international economic policy has been subordinated to the industrial and trade policies of other countries,” adding that the goal of the new approach is to deliver “better outcomes for American workers, their families, and their communities.” The implication is clear: trade policy is no longer judged primarily by aggregate efficiency, but by its contribution to domestic resilience.
This change matters less in speeches than in spreadsheets. For international businesses engaging with the United States – Italian firms among them – the cost of doing business is no longer confined to freight, tariffs, and regulatory compliance. It now includes political optionality: the need to absorb sudden shifts in tariffs, enforcement posture, subsidy eligibility, or procurement rules. Market access, once taken for granted, has acquired a price. That price is volatility.
Consider tariffs, the most visible manifestation of the shift. Much of the commentary focuses on whether new levies will be imposed, or existing ones relaxed. Yet the more consequential change is that tariffs have re-entered the US policy toolkit as a standing instrument, rather than an emergency measure. They are no longer merely responses to trade disputes adjudicated through the WTO, but levers of bargaining power – applied, suspended, or threatened to shape behaviour abroad and investment at home.
This matters even when tariffs are capped or selectively applied. The existence of the tool itself alters incentives. Firms hedge inventories, front-load shipments, and renegotiate contracts – not because tariffs are certain to rise tomorrow, but because they plausibly could. As noted in The Economist, anticipation alone can distort trade flows, encouraging stockpiling and short-termism at the expense of longer-term investment planning.
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The economic incidence of tariffs also looks different once the political fog lifts. Despite repeated claims that tariffs are “paid by foreigners,” empirical research from the Kiel Institute, a German think tank, shows that the overwhelming burden falls on American buyers, through higher prices or reduced choice. However, the burden does not stop at the US border. When American customers face higher costs, they respond by squeezing suppliers, delaying purchases, or switching to alternatives. European exporters may not write the cheque to US Customs, but they still feel the cost in thinner margins and weaker demand.
Yet focusing on tariffs alone understates the transformation under way. The deeper shift lies in the fusion of market access with industrial policy. Increasingly, access to the most attractive segments of the U.S. economy – federal procurement, clean-energy subsidies, defence-adjacent manufacturing, even smooth regulatory treatment – depends on where and how goods are produced. Local content, allied sourcing, traceability, and supply-chain “trust” have become commercial differentiators.
Here, the rhetoric of the Commerce Department is revealing. During an April 2025 interview with ABC News, Howard Lutnick, the US Secretary of Commerce, framed trade and industrial policy explicitly through the lens of national security and resilience. “The president has national security in mind,” he said, arguing that critical goods must be produced domestically: “We need to reshore these things… We need to make medicine in America.” The message to foreign firms is not that they are unwelcome, but that participation increasingly requires physical and operational presence inside the United States.
Europe finds itself in an awkward position. For decades, Brussels championed openness and multilateral discipline, often in contrast to American unilateralism. Today, faced with US subsidies, Chinese overcapacity, and geopolitical fragmentation, Europe is edging, sometimes reluctantly, towards its own version of strategic industrial policy. Reporting in the Financial Times on proposals for “Buy European” procurement rules, for instance, reflects a growing recognition that reciprocity matters.
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Italy offers a useful lens through which to view these pressures. The country’s exposure to the US market is significant but highly concentrated. America is Italy’s largest non-EU export destination, absorbing a disproportionate share of its high-value manufacturing output. According to Confindustria, the main association representing manufacturing and service companies in Italy, roughly 7% of Italian manufacturing output – around €90bn annually – is tied to US demand, with particular strength in pharmaceuticals, machinery, transport equipment, and specialized industrial goods. Heightened trade uncertainty could shave around 0.3 percentage points off Italian GDP growth over the next two years – a modest figure in isolation, but meaningful in a low-growth environment.
Looking ahead, the broad direction of US policy appears clearer than its precise contours. Over the next 12 to 24 months, tariffs are likely to remain a negotiating lever rather than a universal barrier, deployed selectively in politically salient sectors such as autos, metals, and strategic manufacturing. Even if headline tariff rates stabilise, enforcement will not. Customs scrutiny, export controls, procurement rules, and subsidy conditions will increasingly function as de facto gatekeepers to the American market.
For businesses, the implications are sobering but not bleak. The American market remains vast, innovative, and profitable. But it is no longer frictionless. Success will depend less on predicting policy perfectly, than on building resilience: granular exposure analysis by product line; investment in traceability and compliance systems; and credible options for US-based assembly, servicing, or partnerships.
In the end, the question facing Italian and European firms is not whether the US market is worth engaging. It plainly is. The question is how much volatility they are prepared to absorb – and how intelligently they price it in.