Here we go again!

Disruption has become the operating condition. For many, the commercial response is still designed for the exception.

On 1 July, Brent crude closed at $71.57 a barrel. On 23 July it settled at $100.69, gaining almost 7% in a single session and around 40% in three weeks.¹ On the same day, the Office of the United States Trade Representative confirmed duties of 10% to 12.5% on imports from some 60 economies accounting for 99% of US imports, effective one minute after midnight.² Iran-aligned Houthi forces struck two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, having declared a maritime embargo on Saudi shipping days earlier. Several loaded carriers turned around mid-voyage.³

The commercial machinery in many organisations still treats each occurrence as an aberration, or part of an increasingly tedious continuum. Force majeure is invoked, hardship provisions, suspension rights and delay terms are consulted, price adjustment is demanded and resisted, and legal teams are asked to review contract portfolios they cannot easily analyse. Then the event subsides, only for the next one to come piling in. Hence the phrase that keeps coming to mind, and the title of this piece.

What is actually new this time

Three features of the current escalation break the pattern of previous ones, and each has a specific contractual consequence.

The tariff is priced against a third government’s conduct. These are not product duties or trade-balance duties. They are Section 301 measures triggered by a trading partner’s alleged failure to legislate and enforce a ban on goods made with forced labour. The rate applied to your goods is therefore determined by the legislative behaviour of a state that is party neither to your contract nor to the dispute, assessed unilaterally by the importing state, and revisable at any point in the life of the agreement. India illustrates the mechanism: initially designated at 12.5%, it qualified for 10% after tightening enforcement between proposal and implementation.⁴ A change-in-law clause typically addresses the law of the place of performance or the law governing the parties. Almost none of them contemplate a trigger of this shape, which means the exposure sits in the gap between drafted risk and real risk – unallocated, and therefore litigated.

Trade policy has absorbed supply chain due diligence. Human rights diligence has been treated by most organisations as a reporting and reputational obligation, resourced accordingly and housed away from the commercial function. It now carries a direct price of up to 2.5 percentage points of landed cost, with product-level differentiation for several countries. At the same time, exemptions have been granted for oil, gas, fertilizer and goods qualifying under the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement.⁵ The commercial advantage moves to whoever can produce the evidence: origin documentation, classification records, visibility into the tiers below the direct supplier. Traceability clauses that have sat unexercised in supplier agreements for a decade have just become pricing instruments.

Diversification has produced concentration. Saudi Arabia responded to the disruption of Hormuz by redirecting more than 70% of affected exports through the Red Sea. The Red Sea route is now under declared blockade and active attack.⁶The resilience measure created the new single point of failure. This is the clearest evidence yet for a question we raised in our June research and could not then settle: whether organisations are overcorrecting in ways that generate hidden fragility. Alternate routes, second sources and backup ports offer protection only where the alternative is genuinely uncorrelated with the primary. Very few organisations test that correlation, and most contractual continuity provisions simply name the alternative without examining it.

There is a fourth development worth watching closely. Marine underwriters have signalled that cover can be withdrawn from vessels paying transit tolls at Hormuz.⁷ When insurance is withdrawn, the constraint moves from cost to availability, and a price adjustment mechanism becomes irrelevant. What follows is non-performance, and an argument about a clause that was drafted for something else.

So is this a fight about price?

Price is where the argument often surfaces, but it may not be where the problem originates.

Consider what an organisation must be able to do to respond well to the events of the past three weeks. It must identify, within hours, which live contracts are exposed to a 12.5% duty and which qualify for an exemption. It must locate the evidence supporting that qualification. It must know which delivery obligations depend on a single maritime corridor, and which of its alternates depend on the same corridor. It must know where its energy exposure is fixed, where it is indexed, and where the index resets. It must know which counterparties are carrying unhedged exposure severe enough to threaten their solvency, because a supplier’s failure will cost more than the price increase it was resisting.

Our June survey found that a substantial proportion of organisations cannot do the first of those things. Many require at least two weeks to assess contractual exposure to a new disruption event, and a significant group has no systematic process at all.⁸ Brent moved 40% in three weeks. The cycle time of disruption is now shorter than the cycle time of contractual response, which means the negotiation over price adjustment begins after the economics have already been decided elsewhere.

Price is the layer of the problem that is visible to everyone, which is why it absorbs the attention. Underneath it sit portfolio legibility, evidentiary capability, correlated dependency and insurability – none of which can be fixed once an event is underway.

Why we stay tactical

The obvious response is to call for better anticipation and more strategic planning. We have made that call ourselves, repeatedly, and it has not worked. It is worth asking why.

Our research points to a structural explanation rather than a failure of will. Organisations cannot calculate the cost of disruption, because they cannot locate where it will land in their contract portfolio. They cannot build the economic case for resilience, because the costs sit in one function and the offsetting benefits in another, and no one holds both sets of numbers. And any unilateral move toward resilience meets resistance from counterparties under identical pressure, each seeking to transfer the same risk in the opposite direction. Investment in resilience therefore fails the business case test that the organisation itself applies. Inaction is the rational individual choice, and the aggregate outcome is a system that fights itself.⁹

This is why exhortation fails. Commercial teams are behaving sensibly within the constraints they face. The constraints are the problem.

When do we become strategic?

When the economics become visible. That is the whole of the answer, and it sets the agenda.

Four things follow.

Make the portfolio legible before the next event. Exposure mapping is a data exercise conducted in calm conditions. It cannot be performed during a crisis, which is precisely when every organisation attempts it. The organisations that responded well to this month’s tariff announcement had already tagged their contracts by origin, corridor and index.

Pre-agree the mechanism, then argue about the number. Disputes over price adjustment consume weeks because the parties are negotiating the principle and the quantum simultaneously, under time pressure, with both sides believing the other is opportunistic. Agreeing the trigger, the reference index, the sharing ratio and the review cadence in advance converts a negotiation into a calculation. The June research was unambiguous on the sequence: principles before mechanisms, and shared interest ahead of positional standoff.

Stop routing a permanent condition through force majeure. Force majeure allocates the unforeseeable. Annual geopolitical disruption is foreseeable, which is why these claims fail and why the resulting arguments are so bitter – both parties are reasoning under a clause designed for a different world. Recurring disruption belongs in the pricing and governance architecture, where it can be managed, rather than in the excuse architecture, where it can only be contested.

Connect governance to the commercial decision. Fewer than one organisation in six reports board-level oversight of geopolitical risk, and a substantial minority has no formal governance or only an ad hoc arrangement.¹⁰ Governance that meets quarterly to review a risk register has no bearing on a sourcing decision taken on a Tuesday afternoon. The connection has to be operational.

The uncomfortable part

Every organisation reading this has a supplier or customer who read the same headlines this week and reached the opposite conclusion about who should absorb the cost. That symmetry is the reason the tactical response keeps failing. Unilateral resilience is unavailable when the exposure is shared, and it is always shared.

The strategic move is therefore not a better clause. It is a conversation with the counterparty about an exposure both parties can see and neither can carry alone, conducted before the event rather than during it. That conversation is difficult, slow and unfamiliar. It is also the only version of this that works.

We will publish the next wave of disruption research in the autumn. On present evidence, the events will have moved again by then and the commercial response will not have. The question for members is a simple one: when the next headline arrives, will your organisation be reading it, or will it already have acted?

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Sources

Footnotes

1. CNBC, 23 July 2026, reporting Brent settlement at $100.69, the first close above $100 since 26 May. Opening figure of $71.57 for 1 July reported by CNN, 23 July 2026. ↩
2. Office of the United States Trade Representative, announcement of 23 July 2026, reported by Reuters, Bloomberg and NPR. Duties imposed under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, replacing temporary Section 122 levies introduced after the Supreme Court ruling of 20 February 2026. ↩
3. Saudi Press Agency, confirming the attack on the tanker Encelia; Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree, quoted by Al Jazeera; OilPrice.com and The National, 23 July 2026. ↩
4. Senior administration official, quoted by the Associated Press and NPR, 23 July 2026. ↩
5. Associated Press / NPR, 23 July 2026. ↩
6. OilPrice.com, 23 July 2026, on the redirection of Saudi export volumes following disruption at the Strait of Hormuz. ↩
7. CNN, 23 July 2026, reporting the marine insurance trade group position on transit tolls. ↩
8. WorldCC / CCM Institute Geopolitical Disruption Survey, June 2026, n = 59. ↩
9. Geopolitical Disruption and Commercial Paralysis, WorldCC / CCM Institute, June 2026. ↩
10. WorldCC / CCM Institute Geopolitical Disruption Survey, June 2026. ↩