Sanctions and Tariffs Are Becoming the Same Thing

Donald Trump has stopped using two different words for the two things. When he talks about tariffs on countries that buy Russian energy, he calls them secondary sanctions ^[1]. From the other direction, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee looked this week at the Russia sanctions bill the Senate just passed and saw a tariff machine. Gregory Meeks put it plainly.

This is not so much a sanctions bill as it is a massive backdoor authority for President Trump to impose more tariffs, including on our European allies, that hurt American families. — Gregory Meeks

Two actors, two branches, each reaching for the other instrument's name. That is the wall dissolving in language before it dissolves in law. The bill Meeks was describing is the Graham Act, which the Senate passed 86-11 this week ^[2]. It does the things a sanctions bill is supposed to do: 500% tariffs on Russian exports to the United States, a ban on US energy exports to Russia, restrictions on investment in Russian sovereign debt ^[3]. But its most contested provision is something else — discretionary authority for the president to impose duties of up to 100% on the five largest importers of Russian crude and gas, a list that includes the European Union, Japan, and South Korea ^[3]. The bill did not start out this way. In June 2025, the Senate push targeted China and India with 500% tariffs on Russian energy purchases, and Trump himself was skeptical ^[4]. By this month it had become a general-purpose tariff lever, handed to a president who now wants it. The telling moment is the co-author's defense. Richard Blumenthal insists the bill is not a tariffs bill.

It’s been referred to as a tariffs bill, but actually it imposes full blocking sanctions on wide swaths of the Russian economy, including its energy industry, financial industry, defence industrial base, oligarchs, business people, and Vladimir Putin himself — Richard Blumenthal

Then, in the same breath, he describes the tariff power as real — up to 100% on the five major purchasers, with waiver authority he insists is tightly drawn. Even the bill's own author concedes the wall is down while trying to insist it stands. The White House has been doing the same thing from the other end. The first legal basis for the universal tariff was IEEPA — the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a national-emergency and sanctions statute that had never been used for tariffs in its fifty-year history ^[5]. The administration cited national emergencies involving trade deficits and fentanyl trafficking to impose a 10% universal tariff and targeted levies on China, Canada, Mexico, India, and Brazil ^[5]. Trump described the tariffs as revenue machines and warned that losing the case would be a national security disaster.

It would be an economic disaster, [and] it would be a national security disaster if we lost the case. — Donald Trump

Then the national-security vocabulary migrated to industrial policy. The White House frames semiconductor tariffs as essential to national and economic security ^[6], and describes the pharmaceutical reshoring — more than $250 billion in pledges after a 200% tariff threat — as a strategy to strengthen national security and harden supply chains ^[7]. The language that once justified squeezing an adversary now justifies forcing chipmakers to build in Arizona. And when the courts struck each legal basis down, the administration simply swapped in another. IEEPA fell at the Supreme Court in February 2026; the pivot to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 fell at the Court of International Trade in May 2026; now Section 301 investigations cover 99% of US imports ^[8][9]. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had already confirmed the contingency.

Unwinding them could cause significant disruption — Scott Bessent

The specific authority is a replaceable part; the tariff policy stays fixed. The courts are the last institution still maintaining the distinction. They keep treating emergency law and trade law as separate domains with separate requirements, and they keep striking down the tariffs that blur them ^[10][9]. But the political branches have already merged the vocabulary. Congress writes tariff power into a sanctions bill; the White House writes national-security language into industrial tariffs; the president calls one instrument by the other's name. The courts can rebuild the wall. The people on both sides of it have stopped using two different words for what they're doing.