Bangladesh, Jan. 9 -- There are wars that begin with missiles and those that begin with memos. Donald Trumps latest economic offensive belongs firmly to the second category. A 500 percent tariff threat on India—embedded in the so-called Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025—is not merely an escalation of sanctions policy. It is something larger, and far more destabilizing: an undeclared trade war against the Global South, waged under the moral pretext of Ukraine and the strategic paranoia of American decline.

History offers a cautionary note. Great powers rarely announce their decline; they legislate it. Britains imperial unraveling did not begin with Suez in 1956, but with decades of imperial overreach masked as order-keeping. The ...