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View all search resultsRI catches break after US Supreme Court ruling on Trump tariffs
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President Prabowo Subianto (right) shakes hands with United States President Donald Trump during the Board of Peace council summit on Feb. 19, 2026, in Washington, DC. (Courtesy of Presidential Secretariat Press Bureau, United States Institute of Peace, Washington, DC/Cahyo)
T
he government has signaled that it will refrain for now from any decisive follow-up to its new bilateral trade deal with the United States after a US Supreme Court ruling raised questions over the legality of US tariff policies.
Signed in Washington, DC, on Thursday, the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) imposes an import tariff of 19 percent on most Indonesian products entering the US, preventing an initially threatened rate of 32 percent.
The US Supreme Court came out with a ruling the very next day that found that US President Donald Trump’s tariff policy, used to extract far-reaching concessions from Indonesia and dozens of other US trade partners, exceeded the presidents’ executive powers and would have required congressional approval.
Specifically, the ruling invalidated the legal basis used for Trump’s tariff policy, leaving up in the air bilateral trade agreements the US signed since April last year.
“We are ready to face every possibility. We will respect the US’s domestic politics, we’ll monitor the development,” reads a statement issued by President Prabowo Subianto on Saturday.
Prabowo was still in the US capital, where he and Donald Trump had signed a commitment to the trade deal hours before the actual ART was inked by US Trade Representative (USTR) Jamieson Greer and Office the Coordinating Economy Minister Airlangga Hartarto at the USTR headquarters.
The US Constitution grants Congress the exclusive authority to issue tariffs, unless the legislature delegates that right to the executive branch through a law. While the US has been threatening and imposing tariffs against imports from many countries over the past 10 months, all of them originated from the President, not the US Congress.
