If you listened only to the political debate, you could be forgiven for thinking the age of global trade was coming to an end. 

Tariffs remain in the headlines. Governments are prioritising economic security and encouraging companies to bring production closer to home. Geopolitical tensions are reshaping relationships businesses once took for granted. The language of the moment is resilience and self-sufficiency.

Yet inside businesses, something rather different is happening.

Santander has surveyed more than 6,000 companies across Europe and the Americas for our latest Trade Barometer. We asked whether international trade had become more or less important to their plans for growth.

55% said more important. Just 4% said less. That is striking. As external forces push towards retrenchment, businesses themselves continue to look beyond their borders.

They are not blind to the risks. Companies identify tariffs and trade restrictions, geopolitical tensions and weak global growth among the threats they face. Nor are they carrying on as before. Supply chains are changing as businesses diversify suppliers, move some production closer to home and reduce dependence on individual countries.

It would be easy to see this simply as deglobalisation. But the evidence suggests something more complicated is happening.

The World Trade Organization describes global value chains as being “rewired”. Despite the shocks of recent years, they still account for more than 46% of global trade, close to their recent peak.

Businesses are not abandoning international trade. They are changing how they engage with it.

For decades, the dominant logic of international business was efficiency. Companies built supply chains wherever they could produce most cheaply.

Today, businesses are trying to combine efficiency with another imperative: resilience. They are thinking harder about where they source, how dependent they are on individual markets and how quickly they can adapt when disruption occurs.

But this is not simply a case of sacrificing efficiency for security. Among the businesses in our survey that are looking to transform or diversify their supply chains, the most common reason, cited by 59%, is to gain efficiency or save costs. Reducing exposure to geopolitical risk and the vulnerabilities of long-distance shipping are also important.

Businesses are therefore not simply choosing between efficiency and resilience. They are trying to achieve both: diversifying suppliers, shortening some supply chains and building more options into the way they operate internationally.

And the reason is growth. Nearly four in five businesses we surveyed are confident they will grow over the next three years. Companies already operating internationally are more confident than domestically focused businesses. And 59% of domestic and aspiring international firms are considering international expansion over the next three years.

Technology could accelerate this shift. Artificial intelligence is the leading investment priority among the businesses surveyed. Among internationally active or aspiring businesses, 64% believe AI will enable them to serve more markets and 60% believe it will help them enter new ones faster.

For smaller companies especially, that matters. International expansion brings complexity: understanding regulation, finding customers, navigating customs and identifying trustworthy partners. AI cannot eliminate those barriers, but it can reduce some of the information disadvantages smaller businesses face.

There is a lesson here for policymakers. Governments have legitimate reasons to strengthen economic security. But resilience and openness are not necessarily opposites. Diversifying customers and suppliers across markets can itself be a source of resilience.

What businesses need is predictability. Our research finds bureaucracy, finding trustworthy partners and shipping costs among the biggest obstacles companies encounter internationally. Free trade agreements also influence which markets many businesses are prepared to enter.

The debate about trade has focused heavily on what the world is moving away from: dependence, distant supply chains and an era in which efficiency often took precedence over resilience.

Businesses are asking a more practical question: where will the next source of growth come from?

Their answer suggests that the future of trade will be more complex, more diversified and sometimes more regional. But it will still be international.

In a world becoming more fragmented, businesses increasingly believe that opportunities for growth still lie beyond their borders.