Trump’s Tariff Move Risks Prolonged Economic Chaos – OpEd

February 25, 2026 
By Dr. Imran Khalid

For decades, the world’s most valuable American export was not a physical commodity or a digital service. It was the reliable predictability of the U.S. legal system. That certainty premium, the bedrock on which the global “Pax Americana” was built, is currently evaporating. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court didn’t just strike down a tariff in Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump. It effectively told the White House that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is no longer a blank check for economic policy.

The President’s immediate response—invoking Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 to slap an escalating 15 percent duty on imports by February 24—is being framed as a show of strength. In reality, it is a sign of a presidency trapped in a loop of executive overreach and judicial correction. This is no longer just a trade war with China. The commander-in-chief, who views the law as a suggestion, has launched a domestic cold war against a court that has finally decided to act as a constitutional gatekeeper. The chaos is compounded by the fact that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) remains in a partial shutdown, leaving the very Customs and Border Protection officers tasked with collecting these new taxes and processing billions in court-ordered refunds working without pay.

The reaction from Capitol Hill suggests that this domestic conflict has already turned hot, revealing a Congress struggling to reclaim its pulse. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) hailed the ruling as a “win for the wallets of every American consumer,” while Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) demanded a mechanism to ensure that the nearly $180 billion in illegal collections reaches families and small businesses rather than vanishing into the federal ether. Meanwhile, the Republican response has been fractured Although Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) called for the GOP to “codify the tariffs” to protect the domestic base, veteran leaders like Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) noted that the “empty merits of sweeping trade wars” were evident long before the ruling.

The United States thus at the edge of a “150-Day Trap.” By retreating to Section 122, the administration has pivoted from the open-ended authority of IEEPA to a statute with a hard expiration date. This creates a state of permanent economic whiplash. For a CEO in Munich or a farmer in Iowa, the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of the calendar. Every five months, the American economy will face a cliff where tariffs might vanish, be renewed, or be struck down by the next inevitable injunction. This volatility is the antithesis of the stability that global markets crave.

The global fallout of this institutional decay is profound. For 70 years, the U.S. dollar functioned as the world’s reserve currency because of a belief in American “institutional reliability.” When the president attacks the families of Supreme Court justices and suggests the highest court in the land is “swayed by foreign interests,” he is signaling to every foreign investor that the United States is becoming a “banana republic” of the North. In Brussels and Tokyo, leaders are already signaling potential WTO consultations, no longer viewing Washington as a partner but as a source of “geopolitical entropy.”

Furthermore, the constitutional crisis is a fiscal catastrophe in the making. With the Supreme Court ruling the previous duties illegal, the Treasury is now staring down the barrel of billions in potential refunds. The exemptions listed in the February 20 proclamation—covering everything from beef and tomatoes to aerospace parts—reveal the administration’s own lack of confidence. They are attempting a “surgical strike” on global trade while using a sledgehammer. By exempting items that would cause immediate inflationary spikes, the White House is tacitly admitting that a true global tariff is an economic suicide pact. These carve-outs don’t fix the problem. They merely highlight the internal contradictions of a policy that tries to punish the world while pleading for it to keep supplying basic needs.

The solution is not more executive orders. It’s a return to the power of the purse. If these tariffs are truly essential for national security, the administration must do the hard work of building a legislative consensus. A new Trade Framework Act that sets clear, bipartisan triggers for tariffs would restore U.S. institutional reliability. This would require the White House to treat Congress as a co-equal branch rather than an annoyance.

Until that happens, the United States remains an economy governed by decree and challenged by decree—a superpower struggling to define who is in charge of its checkbook. The world is no longer waiting for America to lead. It is waiting for America to follow its own laws.

This article was published at FPIF


Dr. Imran Khalid is a geostrategic analyst and columnist on international affairs. His work has been widely published by prestigious international news organizations and journals.