Mexico Approves Up-to-50% Tariffs on Non-FTA Asian Imports; China Protests

Tariff walls are nothing new: the 1930 U.S. Smoot-Hawley Act raised duties on 20,000 items and helped fracture global trade; a century later, the 2018–20 U.S.–China tariff war showed how quickly great-power frictions can spill into supply chains. Mexico’s step fits a longer arc toward regionalised blocs—NAFTA in 1994, USMCA in 2020, and now selective barriers against nations outside those frameworks. By taxing Asian inputs while preserving programs like PROSEC/IMMEX for re-exports, Mexico is signalling it wants near-shored production tied to North America, not East Asia. Whether China retaliates or shrugs off the hit matters less than the structural trend: world commerce is drifting from multilateral rules toward FTA-centric spheres. On a 100-year horizon, this episode may be a footnote, but it is another brick in a wall of slow de-globalisation that, like inter-war tariffs, could cumulatively redraw the map of manufacturing and power.