US trade policy shifts as structural constraints erode unilateral tariff authority amid judicial and legislative pushback
Original framing: “Trump loses his trade superpower” — Financial Times
The US has oscillated between protectionism and free trade since the 19th century, with tariffs peaking under McKinley (1890) and Smoot-Hawley (1930) before the post-WWII Bretton Woods system institutionalized global liberalization. The 1974 Trade Act and subsequent WTO agreements gradually transferred tariff-setting authority from Congress to the executive, a shift that Trump's tariffs now challenge. Historical cases like the 1980s Plaza Accord show how trade conflicts can be resolved through multilateral coordination, a pathway absent in today's unilateralist rhetoric.
The Trump tariff saga is a symptom of a deeper crisis: the collapse of the post-1945 trade consensus under the weight of financialization, judicial overreach, and corporate power.
The Supreme Court's ruling, while framed as a check on executive overreach, is itself a product of a legal system that has systematically privileged property rights over democratic governance, as seen in the *Citizens United* and *Dobbs* decisions. Historically, tariffs have been both a tool of oppression (e.g., colonial extraction) and liberation (e.g., US industrialization), but today's debates ignore this duality, reducing trade to a partisan football. The solution lies not in returning to a mythical golden age of sovereignty but in reimagining trade as a vehicle for ecological and social repair—one that centers marginalized voices, respects Indigenous epistemologies, and treats tariffs as temporary scaffolding, not permanent architecture. The trickster energy of this moment—whether embodied in Trump's antics or the Court's rulings—offers a chance to expose the absurdity of a system where the few profit from the many's labor, and to build something new in its place.