The country-specific “reciprocal” tariffs that defined the first year of Trump’s trade agenda are gone, struck down in court. But the tariffs on imports have not disappeared. They have been rebuilt on different legal ground and remain in effect today.

The Supreme Court Killed the Country Rates

In February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the president to impose tariffs. The decision invalidated the April 2025 “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs entirely, including every country-by-country rate: Vietnam at 46 percent, Thailand at 36 percent, Taiwan at 32 percent, the EU at 20 percent, and the stacked rates on China.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick used a concrete-pouring ceremony at Micron’s fab site in Clay, New York, to tell Samsung Electronics and SK hynix that they will build memory fabs in the United States. Not by regulation. By envy. Micron is leading, he said, so the Koreans will feel jealous and ultimately have no choice but to follow.

The remarks landed one day before SK hynix listed American Depositary Receipts on the Nasdaq, and ten days after Samsung and SK hynix announced a combined ₩800 trillion investment program in Korea’s Honam region. The sequencing is the story. Washington watched two companies that control roughly 60% of the global DRAM market commit a generational capex cycle to their home country, and responded by asking them to commit it somewhere else.

Japan built the modern semiconductor industry. By the mid-1980s it held more than half of global DRAM market share and was the presumptive long-term dominant force in chip manufacturing. Within two decades that position had been absorbed almost entirely by Taiwan and South Korea. The transfer of leadership was not the result of a single competitive reversal. It was structural, compounding, and in several respects self-inflicted.

The 1986 Trade Agreement

The proximate wound arrived through policy. The US-Japan Semiconductor Trade Agreement of 1986 set floor prices on Japanese chip exports and required that foreign companies reach a 20% share of the Japanese domestic market. Washington framed it as reciprocity. The practical effect was to hand American and Korean competitors a margin-protected breathing window at exactly the moment when fab investment requirements were beginning to escalate sharply. TSMC was founded the following year. The timing was not a coincidence — the agreement had altered the risk calculus for a pure-play foundry model that Japan had dismissed and the US had reason to encourage.