Global Issue: Navigating global logistics amid political shocks

Mark Twain once said: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” That sentiment, as contributing editor Brooks Bentz noted in our January Rate Outlook cover story, feels especially fitting for what we’ve been witnessing in the logistics and freight transportation management sector in the U.S. and around the world.

Twain suggested that events may not occur again in exactly the same way; however, there are often enough similarities to make it seem like déjà vu. Welcome to 2025.

For shippers, the challenges seem unrelenting and too familiar—price fluctuations, geopolitical tensions, natural disasters, labor disruptions, infrastructure issues, the possibility of new tariffs—all putting logistics management strategies to the test to optimize supply chain performance across all phases of the game.

Meanwhile, carriers are navigating a landscape of high operating costs and persistently low rates. This dynamic has created opportunities for shippers with strong tender acceptance rates and limited exposure to the spot market. However, no matter how buttoned up your ground transportation game may be here at home, you may feel untethered when attempting to wrap your arms around your global ocean and airfreight moves over the coming six months.

The global logistics landscape, which we’ve spent the past decade striving to master, is shifting as rapidly as the daily headlines hit our screens. And now as the new administration takes its position in the White House, there are rumblings that even the rules of this shifting game will start to change.

As professionals, it’s incredibly difficult to accept the advice of “wait and see”—but that’s exactly the counsel being given to shippers from the world’s leading supply chain thought leaders here in February 2025 concerning any level of global moves.

So, what’s the first step to gain an understanding of what’s ahead? I suggest our 2025 Rate Outlook web event if you haven’t already watched. It launched on Jan. 30 and is now available on demand. In fact, we have six of those world-leading supply chain thought leaders joining us to break down where rates are headed across all modes.

My second tip is to digest our Global Issue, as there’s no one better in the logistics industry to put the current state of global logistics into pragmatic perspective than our European correspondent Dagmar Trepins (cover story). From her office in Denmark, Trepins has been keeping a keen eye on the European and global logistics landscapes for Logistics Management for 22 years—and quickly admits she has never witnessed anything like this period of time.

“The global logistics industry has never faced the new year with greater anxiety,” says Trepins. She, like our panel of six thought leaders, agree that this “wait-and-see” moment is putting undue, additional strain on global supply chain management leaders at a time when the industry is facing existing and unyielding challenges.

“It’s unprecedented,” says Trepins. “In the meantime, it’s not yet clear how high the proposed tariffs will ultimately be, when they’ll be implemented, or whether the announcement was simply being used as a threat to exert political pressure and negotiate deals.”

As Trepins reports, once shippers got even the slightest sniff of new tariffs, they started shipping early to beat the clock. “And now this rush could increase the price of shipping containers, increase the cost of inland transportation and storage, and inflate the risk of port congestion. It’s created a domino effect that could take months to sort out.”