Domino effect of US tariff ruling will unfold slowly

Other legal dominoes like the H-IB visas could fall.

- Cory Alpert

President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping after a bilateral meeting in South Korea in October 2025. Mr Trump will head to Beijing in March for a summit with the Chinese leader lacking the leverage he anticipated, as the US Supreme Court ruling has effectively disarmed his favourite trade weapon. PHOTO: REUTERS

(REUTERS)

US President Donald Trump briefly addressed the Supreme Court justices who attended his annual State of the Union speech, calling their ruling, which ended his signature tariff plan, “very unfortunate”.

In that 6-3 ruling, the court invalidated his ability to levy his alleged “reciprocal tariffs” — the core of his tariff regime. In an instant, hundreds of billions of dollars in trade levies became legally unenforceable.

This ruling effectively disarms Mr Trump’s favourite trade weapon. Throughout his first term in the White House, he has used the threat of unilateral tariffs to extract concessions globally. By controlling access to the United States markets via executive fiat, he attempted to fashion a new global trading order as dealmaker in chief.

With that weapon neutralised, he will head to Beijing in March for a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping lacking the leverage he anticipated. Presidential summits require exhaustive planning — I spent nearly half a year involved with President Joe Biden’s meeting with Mr Xi in San Francisco in 2023 - and the Trump team expected to enter negotiations with the tariff threat intact.

Many other controls like those on Chinese electric vehicles and semiconductors remain in place, but the optics are fraught. Mr Trump spent a year trying to recalibrate the US trade relationship with China through a tool the Supreme Court ruled he never legally possessed. This raises a vital question: what does a “Plan B” China policy look like?

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