The US Supreme Court’s ruling last week on President Donald Trump’s tariffs has been perceived as a significant setback for his administration’s economic and foreign policy agenda. Having previously called the verdict “deeply disappointing” in its immediate aftermath, Trump on Tuesday (February 24) reiterated his displeasure during what was his longest State of the Union address to date (108 minutes), where he said that despite the court’s “very unfortunate ruling”, the “threat of tariffs” would “remain in place under fully approved and tested alternative legal statutes”. A recent piece in Financial Times by Peter Navarro, senior White House counsellor for trade and manufacturing, attempted to read between the lines of the court ruling, focusing on these “alternative legal statutes”. Navarro, considered the chief architect of Trump’s tariff strategy, has targeted India in the past. In an FT op-ed last August, he had accused India of funding Russia’s war in Ukraine by acting as a “global clearinghouse for Russian oil”  and calling India’s dependence on Russian crude “opportunistic”. So, what is Navarro’s contention on the recent …