The tax man just got evicted.

In a move that’s sent shockwaves from the clean rooms of Silicon Valley to the humidity of New Delhi, the Supreme Court finally decided that the executive branch can’t just slap a "national security" label on every piece of plastic and silicon crossing the border. The trade war, it seems, has run out of ammunition. For years, the tech industry has been coughing up billions in surcharges, waiting for a judicial savior that finally showed up in robes and a bad mood.

The ruling is a direct hit to the policy of protectionism-by-decree. The Court basically told the White House that Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act isn't a blank check for the President to play King of the Port. You can’t just wake up, decide that imported aluminum or 5G routers are a threat to the republic, and hike the price by 25 percent without a very specific, very legal reason. The Justices weren’t buying the "trust us, it’s for your own good" routine anymore.

Don’t expect your next iPhone to be $200 cheaper tomorrow, though. This isn’t about your wallet. It’s about who holds the leash on global commerce. For the big-ticket hardware players—the Apples, the Nvidias, the guys building the server racks that run your life—this is a massive victory for their margins, not necessarily for your bank account. They’ve been eating these costs, or passing them on to you, for years. Now, they get a windfall. But history tells us that when a corporation gets a tax break, they don't usually hand the savings to the guy buying a laptop at Best Buy. They buy back their own stock.

The real friction, however, isn’t in San Francisco. It’s in India.

New Delhi is currently "studying the implications." That’s a lovely, polite way of saying the Ministry of External Affairs is hyperventilating into a paper bag. For the last half-decade, India’s entire economic pitch has been built on a single, shaky premise: "The U.S. hates China, so come build your factories here." They called it the "China Plus One" strategy. The "One" was supposed to be India.

They’ve poured billions into Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes, trying to lure the likes of Foxconn and Wistron away from the Pearl River Delta. They’ve been building massive manufacturing hubs in Tamil Nadu and Gujarat, betting that the U.S. tariff wall would stay high enough to make Indian labor look like a bargain. But if the Supreme Court just knocked a hole in that wall, the math changes.

If Chinese-made components are suddenly 25 percent cheaper to land in Long Beach, why would a tech giant deal with the logistical nightmare of moving their supply chain to the subcontinent? India’s infrastructure is getting better, sure, but it isn’t China’s. Not yet. Without the artificial handicap of the tariffs, the "Plus One" strategy looks less like a masterstroke and more like a massive, expensive gamble.

The specific trade-off here is brutal. We’re talking about a $40 billion semiconductor push in India that was predicated on a world where trade was a weapon. If trade is suddenly just trade again, those subsidized factories might turn into very expensive ghost towns before they even finish the foundation.

Back home, the political fallout is going to be a mess. The ruling essentially strips the President—any President—of a favorite tool. It turns out that if you want to reshape the global economy, you actually have to go through Congress. What a concept. The lobbyists are already circling K Street, looking for new ways to bake these protections into actual law, but that takes time. And time is the one thing the hardware cycle doesn't have.

So, where does that leave us? The tech giants are popping champagne because their logistics costs just fell off a cliff. The lawyers are prepping for a decade of back-pay lawsuits against the government. And India is left holding a very expensive bag, wondering if they should have spent those billions on something other than a bet on American legal consistency.

The tariffs are dead, but the friction isn’t going anywhere. We’ve spent years trying to decouple the world’s two largest economies, only for a handful of judges to point out that the divorce papers weren’t actually legal.

The real question is whether we’ve already broken the machine beyond repair, or if we’re just waiting for the next administration to find a slightly more legal way to break it again.