Diplomacy Through Supply Chain ‘Containment’: Does It Really Work?

As of 2025, the U.S., with a nominal GDP of $30 trillion, was the world’s largest economy.

Most of what American consumers spend their money on is domestically produced goods and services. That’s not to say that foreign trade isn’t a vital part of the economy. U.S. exports in 2024 accounted for about 11% of GDP, and imports another 14%. With a quarter of the U.S. economy depending on international transactions, supply chain risk is a key C-suite concern. According to a 2025 Supply Chain Annual Risk Report, what worries companies most are extreme weather events, piracy, cyberattack, raw-material shortages and regulatory policy.

To put these worries in perspective, from 2016 to 2024, the total cost of extreme weather events cost U.S. businesses some $750 billion. Much more common, and costly, are cyberattacks. In 2016, there were approximately 250,000 cyber incidents reported in the U.S. By 2022, the number had doubled. With each incident costing U.S. companies on average $4.35 million, cybercrime is a trillion-dollar-per-year problem.

By comparison, the $9 billion lost each year to global pirates would seem small — except for the fact that additional insurance, security and rerouting costs are shouldered by only two dozen or so shipping companies that handle the majority of global trade.

Raw-material shortages are another industry-specific problem. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Quarterly Survey of Plant Capacity Utilization reported in 2024 that roughly 11% of manufacturing plants in the country cited shortages of raw materials as a key capacity utilization problem.  

Whom criminals target, when and where storms strike, and the availability of materials with which to build are problems largely outside a company’s control. As a result, risk management tends to focus on mitigating exposure and developing response plans. The plans that U.S. companies are increasingly