While cross-border commercial disputes have been going on for decades, tariffs struck most businesses as a distant, slowly shifting backdrop. Today they are front-page news, and change with the speed of a presidential press release. Executives who still treat duties as a temporary nuisance are misreading the terrain. Tariffs are now deployed as policy weapons; they can appear overnight, morph within weeks and disappear just as abruptly. In that climate, supplier contracts drafted for a stable tariff regime become trip wires for costly litigation or, worse, silent margin erosion.

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