nave

That would be ridiculously difficult to enforce. Also, most manufacturing, American or not, is already done in metric. It would be trivial for companies to swap units. There are many, many better ways to tariff American goods.

The purpose would be to make it very irritating for American companies to bend to the rest of the world's standard,

OP, I think you’re Canadian, so it might be a bit of an exception but in most countries that use metric, American companies already sell products that only use metric unit. This would literally change nothing.

there is no direct rail link between the SIR and the New York City Subway system

Staten island is the only part of New York City without subway access.

But Wikipedia says it was invented in Rome?

In case you want the actual link https://youtu.be/s2TyVQGoCYo