President Donald Trump said Monday he would impose a 25% tax on imports to the United States from countries that do business with Iran, an effort the administration is framing as pressure on Tehran to end its crackdown on nationwide protests.
The proposal was described by Trump in a social media post, according to the Associated Press. The tariffs are presented as a way to reduce Iran’s access to foreign goods and drive up prices, a strategy that the report said could worsen tensions in a country where inflation is running above 40%.
The AP reported that the death toll from Iran’s latest protests surpassed 2,500 as of Wednesday, with activists attributing the fatalities to the government’s attempt to tamp down dissent amid economic hardship and political repression.
While the administration’s stated target is Iran, the AP said the tariffs could also create blowback for the United States, including by raising prices Americans pay for imports from Iranian trade partners. The story cited Turkish textiles and Indian gemstones as examples of potential U.S. import categories that could be affected.
The AP reported that it remained unclear how the White House intends to apply the tariff policy in practice. It said the White House has not indicated whether the new 25% taxes would be stacked on top of double-digit levies Trump imposed last year on almost every country on Earth, and it said it was also not clear whether some energy imports would be exempt, as Trump has done in the past.
It is also unclear, the AP said, what legal authority the president would rely on for the import taxes. Trump invoked the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act to justify his most sweeping tariffs last year, the AP reported, and businesses and several states have argued in court that Trump overstepped his authority. The Supreme Court is hearing the case, which the report said could result in tariffs being thrown out and refunds being required for U.S. importers.
The AP said Iran is economically isolated after years of sanctions aimed at halting its nuclear program, but it still conducted nearly $125 billion in international trade in 2024, including $32 billion with China, $28 billion with the United Arab Emirates and $17 billion with Turkey. The story also said Iran bought more than $6 billion in imports from the European Union that year, adding that energy dominates Iran’s exports and listing gold, grain and smartphones among top imports.
The Associated Press said Trump’s attempt to pressure Iran could create collateral damage beyond U.S. consumers. Most notably, the AP said the new tariffs could threaten the trade truce Trump reached last year with China, which followed triple-digit tariff exchanges in 2025 that briefly panicked global markets before the two sides de-escalated in October, including by ending China’s boycott of American soybeans and easing restrictions on exports of rare-earth minerals and technologies.
Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator who is now senior vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute, said in a statement that Trump’s threat to increase tariffs by 25% against China and other trading partners due to developments in Iran underscores how fragile the U.S.-China trade truce is. She said even if the tariff hike is not implemented, damage has already been done and that the threat erodes trust between the two countries.
The AP reported that China has said it would retaliate. Mao Ning, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said China’s position on tariffs is “very clear: there are no winners in a tariff war,” and that “China will firmly safeguard its legitimate rights and interests.” John Gong, a professor at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, said “One thing I can guarantee you is that if an extra 25% is slapped on China, China is definitely going to retaliate with another 25% of tariffs.”
The AP also said China’s trade surplus rose to a record of almost $1.2 trillion in 2025, according to the Chinese government, and that Chinese businesses had shifted away from the United States toward other regions such as Europe and Southeast Asia. Gong said the United States market is “not that important to China anymore” and that China can “respond and retaliate” if Trump does something like this.
For India, the AP said the immediate concern is less about India’s trade with Iran and more about its access to the U.S. market. The report said India sent $1.6 billion in exports to Iran in 2024, mainly including rice, tea, sugar, drugs and electrical machinery, compared with $129 billion in goods and services sold to the United States that year. It also said India stopped importing Iranian crude oil in early 2020, after previously importing more than $14 billion worth of Iranian crude oil before the coronavirus pandemic.
Abhijit Mukhopadhyay, a senior economist at the Chintan Research Foundation in New Delhi, told the AP the impact people are focused on is not the India-Iran trade but the impact on India-U.S. trade. He said textiles and garments, gems and jewelry, and engineering goods are likely to be the most vulnerable sectors, and the AP said he also warned that Trump’s move could affect India’s investments in Iran, including the Chabahar port, which provides a trade route that bypasses Pakistan.
Adnan Mazarei, a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told the AP he doubts the tariffs would significantly ease Iran’s crackdown on protesters. “I do not think this is going to be very successful,” Mazarei said, adding that “They will not for this alone change their views or their practices.” He described it as “a repressive regime” willing to pay “a high cost in terms of people’s blood to stay in power.”
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