A Sanctions Bill Named for a Senator Could Triple Tariffs on India and China
A Senate measure aimed at Russia's oil money threatens to reroute the world's energy trade — and stick two of America's biggest trading partners with a bill they didn't order.
By Solomon "Customs" Bridges
The bill carries the name of Senator Lindsey Graham, who is very much alive and serving — an earlier draft of this story wrongly referred to him as deceased, and we correct that here. According to reporting by Al Jazeera, the pending Senate measure would impose sanctions on countries that keep buying Russian energy — and the penalty for two of the biggest buyers, India and China, could be tariffs of up to 100 percent on their exports to the United States.
Here is how the chain works, plain and simple. Russia sells oil. India and China buy it, often at a discount, because Western buyers have mostly walked away since the invasion of Ukraine. That discounted oil helps fund Moscow's war. The bill's logic is to choke that funding by making the buyers pay a price too — at the American border.
The stakes are not abstract. India and China together buy hundreds of billions of dollars in goods from and sell hundreds of billions to the United States each year. A 100 percent tariff would not just hit refiners in Mumbai or traders in Shanghai — it would land on the shelf price of everything from electronics to auto parts to solar panels here at home. Sanctions built to squeeze a war chest have a way of turning into a tax on the shopper standing in an Ohio hardware store.
[Editor's note: This account rests on a single Al Jazeera report; the bill's precise text, sponsors' current status, and timeline for a vote have not been independently confirmed and should be verified before further reporting.]
What's certain is the mechanism itself: Washington has learned that tariffs are a lever it can pull on countries it cannot otherwise touch. Whether that lever bends Moscow's budget or just raises Cleveland's grocery bill is the question nobody in the Senate has yet had to answer out loud.
— Compiled from reporting by Al Jazeera.
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