From power brokers to bit players

Financial Times economics commentator Martin Wolf recently described a 2026 revival of the mercantilist worldview that dominated diplomacy in the 17^th and 18^th centuries. “Mercantilists’ underlying belief was that international economic policy is primarily a tool of state power,” Wolf writes. “Since power, unlike prosperity, is relative, mercantilists think of international economic engagement as ‘zero sum’: you win, I lose.”

China, Wolf asserts, has long been more-or-less open in its geopolitically strategic use of industrial sectors such as EVs, solar technologies, and rare earth metals. It’s plain to see that the Trump administration now also uses tariffs, export controls, investment restrictions, industrial policy, and supply‑chain realignment as core instruments of American power. The rest of the world has yet to fully shift, but when the two dominant economic powers deploy economic policy in similar ways, the global system inevitably tilts with them.

When economic policy and corporate behaviour become subordinate to the strategic geopolitical goals of nation states, this neo-mercantilist environment will reshape the role and impact of corporate communications in three important ways. Contrary to the renewed need for communications voiced by many PR practitioners at the recent World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, each will serve to diminish the importance of communications practitioners to their companies while – adding insult to injury – making their work even more challenging.