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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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February 20, 2026

Trump’s Tariffs:

Back to the

Drawing Board?

Rebuking President Donald Trump’s ambitious assertion of presidential tariff authority, the Supreme Court has struck down the defining policy of Trump’s second term.
 
The tariffs are no more—momentarily, anyway. Invoking other legal authorities, Trump announced at a news conference that he will apply a 10% global tariff to replace what the Court struck down.

The decision did not affect all of Trump’s tariffs. In this case, the Court did not consider those tariffs directed at specific sectors like steel and aluminum or those levied on China over claims of unfair trade practices. The Court has, however, unraveled the bulk of Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff suite affecting most of the world.
 
Tariffs are not just Trump’s signature domestic economic policy; they’re his signature international policy, too. Trump has used tariffs to threaten allies and enemies. He has used them to pressure warring parties to agree to ceasefires. Trump’s tariffs have carried huge implications for the global economy, shifting the developed world away from free trade and toward protectionism
 
They’ve also yielded a flood of one-off deals. The law firm Reed Smith, which maintains a Trump tariff tracker, counts 21 US trade deals made since the president levied tariffs on “Liberation Day” in early April.
 
What happens to those agreements now? 
 
The answer will reveal itself in the coming days and weeks, but we can guess. Ryan Majerus, a trade lawyer with the firm King & Spalding, gave the Global Briefing a broad assessment: “I think they've got a pretty good chance to keep the deals.”
 
The reasons are complicated. Trump is right that he has other tariff authorities to use. As SCOTUSblog’s Amy Howe writes, the Court ruled (basically) that Congress has the authority to raise revenue, which tariffs do. Because of that clear separation of powers, Congress would have to give the president clear and explicit permission to use tariffs on his own, even in cases of emergency. (This involves the “major questions doctrine,” which holds that government agencies should not assume permission from Congress, if there’s doubt, when a policy change is broad and historic in nature.) At the libertarian Cato Institute, Clark Packard applauds the Court’s logic. A scramble for tariff refunds is about to kick off, The Wall Street Journal’s Chao Deng and Rachel Wolfe write.
 
Majerus, the trade lawyer, tells the Global Briefing that Trump indeed has alternative tariff authorities at his disposal. Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 allows him to levy 15% tariffs for up to 150 days, when there’s a large, serious trade deficit that needs correcting. Trump’s new 10% global tariff will likely assert a broad problem in the US net trade deficit and an equally broad solution, covering most of the world with this new tariff rate. Majerus isn’t sure that passes legal muster, but it would take the US court system at least 150 days to decide. Section 301 of the same law lets Trump initiate investigations of unfair trade practices, via the Office of the US Trade Representative. As he wields tariffs as a cudgel in diplomatic negotiations around the world, Trump will have some things to threaten.

Harvard Law professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist Noah Feldman agrees. Given Trump’s alternative legal authorities, “it’s probable that tariffs in some form will ultimately be upheld,” Feldman writes. More broadly, it’s an inflection point for Trump and the Court. The president could abide by the ruling, using other legal avenues carefully to get tariffs back in place. Or he could harangue the Court and attempt to skirt its decision, “emboldening the justices to strike down additional Trump initiatives that violate longstanding legal precedent,” Feldman writes.
 
For Trump, tariffs are several things. They raise revenue. They achieve his protectionist vision of a US economy supported by its own industries—although manufacturing has not yet boomed in the way Trump and his supporters hoped. And, as importantly, tariffs are a means to pressure other countries. Trump has used them like sanctions, threatening tariffs on countries that send oil to Cuba or buy it from Russia. Those foreign-policy priorities don’t have anything to do with the US economy, but Trump has used tariffs to pursue them. 
 
Refunds to already-paid tariffs will require their own adjudication. When it comes to the diplomatic leverage of tariff threats, however, Trump will “have to pivot to something” else besides claiming unilateral authority to set new rates, Majerus says—but Trump does have other tariff powers to pivot to.

The Question of Emergencies

Meanwhile, the Court didn’t rule on a larger question: whether Trump had the authority to declare a national-security emergency over trade deficits, which is how he justified his tariffs in the first place under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

Trump has declared lots of emergencies during his second term, as Fareed detailed last year. For instance, the president claimed the US is under invasion by a Venezuelan gang; that purported emergency allowed him to deport Venezuelan nationals to a notorious prison in El Salvador, despite serious human-rights concerns. 
 
In November, as the Supreme Court weighed Trump’s tariffs, Fareed spoke about the case with Feldman and former Bush administration lawyer and current UC Berkeley Law professor John Yoo. They identified emergency declarations as a particularly important legal wrinkle in Trump’s second presidency, clearly evident in the tariffs case, that could use smoothing. After the Court’s tariffs ruling, it remains as wrinkled as before.

Fareed on Mamdani’s Murky Math

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sailed into office on promises of free bus rides, frozen rent in already-rent-stabilized apartments, and a broad vision of a more affordable city.
 
But is the city affordable to taxpayers? Or to Mamdani’s city government itself? In his latest Washington Post column, Fareed notes that New York spends heavily already. The right gripes consistently about the management of left-leaning cities—and Fareed writes that based on New York’s budget and tax math, the critics have a point.
 
“Using the Lincoln Institute’s fiscally standardized numbers, New York’s general spending in 2023 was more than 30 percent higher per capita than Los Angeles’s—and more than double Houston’s,” Fareed writes. “And what do New Yorkers get for this? Look at New York City schools, the largest district in the country. The city’s education budget has climbed while enrollment has shrunk. It has risen from roughly $34 billion in 2019 to more than $40 billion, with per-student spending projected to reach nearly $35,000 in fiscal 2026—among the highest in the nation. The outputs—graduation numbers, test scores and reading levels—are at best middling, often comparable to places that spend a fraction of what New York does.”
 
Schools are just one example. Broadly, Fareed argues, New Yorkers pay “tax rates comparable to those in European countries that provide, in return, universal health care, free college education and amazing infrastructure.” New Yorkers don’t get such things. The conundrum offers a lesson for the left, Fareed writes: “Democrats in city halls can make the right choice: stop governing as if the goal is to announce new entitlements, and instead make government work—safer streets, functioning schools, predictable sanitation and, above all, enough housing that the middle class can find places to live. New York does not need more soaring rhetoric. It needs more homes.”

Mexico’s Drug Haul

This week, Mexican authorities announced they had seized a cocaine shipment weighing up to four tons.

How was the cocaine being transported?

a) Truck
b) Plane
c) Rail
d) Boat

To see the answer, read to the end of this newsletter.

Russia on the Ropes

“You would have thought that, after four bloody years, a war which neither side can win would have burnt itself out,” The Economist writes. “But not the war in Ukraine. And the blame lies with one man. Vladimir Putin is caught in a vice of his own making. The chances are waning that his armies in Ukraine will produce something he can call victory. Many people expect peace talks … to give him a way out because President Donald Trump will force Ukraine to cede territory. In fact, that escape route is becoming less likely. And even if a peace deal were concluded, the aftershocks inside Russia would risk economic and political instability, wrecking Mr Putin’s plans of being ranked among history’s greatest tsars.”
 
Negotiations between Russia, Ukraine and the US have not yet borne fruit. The war has ground down Ukraine’s ability to conscript and recruit new troops. It has dented Ukrainian morale.  
 
But in an op-ed for The Economist, Alexandra Prokopenko writes that Russia is suffering too. Prokopenko is a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where she has tracked and analyzed Russia’s economy throughout the war. It is now on shaky ground, she writes, likening Russia’s wartime economy to a mountain climber who has passed the “death zone” of just over 24,200 feet—where oxygen is insufficient to sustain human life durably.
 
Today, labor and capital are flowing to Russia’s war-related sectors. But the rest of the economy risks atrophy. The increased military expenditure just rearranges resources internally; it involves no external value flowing into Russia to fund the surge of war-related spending. “A recession is like fatigue,” Prokopenko writes: “rest and you recover. Russia’s [current economic] condition is like altitude sickness: the longer you stay, the worse it gets, regardless of rest. … Russia can probably continue waging war for the foreseeable future. But no climber can survive the death zone indefinitely—and not all climbers who attempt the descent survive it. ... The question Western policymakers must ask is what kind of Russia will emerge when the descent finally begins—and whether anyone has a plan for what comes next.”
 
Ukraine, meanwhile, is fighting a “war of endurance,” Carnegie Endowment military expert Michael Kofman writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. Ukrainian cities are rationing electricity. Many citizens have suffered through the winter cold with little heat and light. 

Nonetheless, Kofman writes: “The situation today is far from dire, although Kyiv entered 2026 in a difficult position. … Russia cannot achieve its political goals by military means alone—it takes Moscow considerable time to capture even small pieces of territory, and doing so comes at a steep cost. The fighting is also about attaining negotiating leverage. Russia retains battlefield advantages, but they have not proved decisive, and more and more, time is working against Moscow. Yet ending the conflict on terms acceptable to Ukraine will not be an easy feat, either. It will require targeted Western support to provide Ukraine advantages in intelligence and technology, continued adaptation by Ukraine’s military to neutralize Russian advantages, and much greater economic pressure by Western countries on Moscow.”

News Quiz:

The Answer Is …

Question: Mexican authorities recently seized up to four tons of cocaine. How was it being transported? Answer: by boat.
 
By submarine, in particular. Reuters reports Mexico announced the seizure Thursday.

To put the seizure in context: a multi-ton maritime drug bust is big, but it’s not uncommon. In November, the US Coast Guard announced it had set its own record, seizing 255 tons of drugs in the preceding fiscal year. On average, the US Coast Guard said, it seizes about 84 tons per year.
 
Small submarines are increasingly common in drug smuggling. Last October, as the Trump administration intensified its campaign to strike alleged drug boats leaving Venezuela, NPR’s Scott Simon asked Steven Dudley, co-founder and co-director of InSight Crime, a think tank that studies organized crime, about underwater drug vessels.
 
“I think it’s something closer to a boat than an actual submarine,” Dudley said. “You basically fasten a very tight fiberglass or wooden hub on the top, and you put a bunch of outboard motors on it, and you run it along the surface of the sea. And it’s just incredibly difficult to detect because of the way they paint it, because of the materials they use. … It’s hard to find, especially once it’s out at sea. … They’re mostly being built in places like Colombia. That’s where most of them have been seized. They are being built mostly in areas near the sea … very often subcontracted out to independent producers. At this stage, you may even have specialists who just do this kind of semisubmersible. So this is part of the way that this works now.”
 
If that sounds advanced, drug subs could get a further upgrade. At the MIT Technology Review, Eduardo Echeverri López writes that drug cartels could soon turn to unmanned subs: underwater smuggling drones.
 
Colombia’s coast guard intercepted one last April, López writes, recounting the apprehension at sea: “First, some unexpected details came over the radio: There was no cocaine on board. Neither was there a crew, nor a helm, nor even enough room for a person to lie down. Instead, inside the hull the crew found a fuel tank, an autopilot system and control electronics, and a remotely monitored security camera. [Colombian regional coast guard commander] González Zamudio’s crew started sending pictures back to Cartagena: Bolted to the hull was another camera, as well as two plastic rectangles, each about the size of a cookie sheet—antennas for connecting to Starlink satellite internet. The authorities towed the boat back to Cartagena, where military techs took a closer look. Weeks later, they came to an unsettling conclusion: This was Colombia’s first confirmed uncrewed narco sub.”