There is a peculiar genius, if one is willing to call it that, in the way empires reduce their subordinates to willing participants in their own subjugation.
Bangladesh and Bangladeshis, still recovering from the wrath of a master who was eroding the country as it just started to realize its independence, rushed with unseemly gratitude into the arms of an interim master who, by choice or necessity, moved to diminish it further.
Muhammad Yunus, the unelected steward of a revolution he did not lead, delivered Bangladesh to the American arms into precisely this arrangement.
The Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART), signed on February 9, 2026, is the latest masterwork in a tradition that Donald Trump, in his famous (and largely unread) book, once called the art of the deal. This ART has now binded a nation of 170 million. It is a $21 billion act of fealty dressed and sold to us as a negotiation.
Constitutional questions in an interim government
Let me speak plainly about what has been done.
Article 145A of the Constitution of Bangladesh is unambiguous. It provides clear safeguards against an unelected administration, operating in the constitutional twilight between a fallen regime and an elected future parliament, to commit the nation to 15 years of energy dependency.
It would prevent a non-representative government to avoid restrictive foreign policy obligations, and preferential purchase agreements worth billions. Treaties of this nature require parliamentary ratification. An act that even the most controversially elected government in the past did not venture down such a path.
The legal doctrine invoked to justify Yunus’s entry as the “interim government”, is the doctrine of necessity. It was coined by 13th-century English jurist Henry de Bracton. It states that administrative acts that are otherwise not lawful are made lawful by “necessity.”
It holds that extraordinary circumstances permit extraordinary actions. What it has historically permitted, from Pakistan to Egypt to a dozen other states that deployed its logic, is the permanent exception.
The extraordinary becomes ordinary, peculiar becomes genius. And the temporary becomes structural. Yunus, our timely caretaker, a global beacon of hope, whether acting on his own judgment, or under influence, in this case used the doctrine to convince himself that only he possesses the wisdom to act.
However, the doctrine of necessity is not a legal principle. It is a legal anaesthetic, administered so that the patient, the unsuspecting public does not feel the incision until the surgery is complete.
Let us remind ourselves again, a caretaker government derives its legitimacy from a single, narrow mandate. To maintain the conditions for a legitimate transfer of power.
It does not possess a mandate for transformation. It does not carry the authority to bind future parliaments, future citizens, or future generations to the particular anxieties and appetites of its own brief tenure. To argue otherwise is not legal reasoning. It is rationalization in the service of a predetermined conclusion.
The tariff shock and the judicial reversal
Here is where the ART achieves a kind of tragic absurdity that even Trump's ghostwriter might have struggled to manufacture.
The entire premise of this agreement as reasoned by Yunus led the government to present it as an urgent necessity -- faced with the brute force of Trump’s tariff gamble imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA.
Bangladesh, as agreed, must purchase American soybeans, American liquefied natural gas, and American aircraft. Beyond purchases, it must accept restrictions on its digital trade and its partnerships with "non-market economies."
It must obey American sanctions on parties. These phrases effectively submerge a sovereign's foreign policy calculations to Washington. All in exchange for relief from these tariffs. Essentially, sovereignty for market access.
The tragic consequences began to unfold even before the US/Israel war on Iran started. On February 20, 2026, 11 days after the ink dried on the ART, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a ruling that uprooted the constitutional foundations of the very tariff Bangladesh had just agreed to pay dearly to escape.
The court found that the IEEPA tariffs represented an overreach of executive authority. The tariffs that justified the deal, the sword held over Bangladesh's head that produced the concessions, are now constitutionally banished.
Bangladesh has agreed to pay for protection from a storm that the court has already ruled cannot legally exist. We are, in the language Trump made famous, getting played.
We have purchased, at the cost of our fiscal and geopolitical autonomy, a (1%) discount on a tax of dubious legality, offered by an administration whose own courts are contesting its authority.
This is but the Trump show, a trade deal holding a sovereign hostage. Its impact as the middle east war rages on, is starting to wreak havoc, and could be catastrophic for a country dependent on foreign energy sources.
The legal consequences of this development are not minor. A treaty that derives its justification from an emergency that no longer legally obtains.
Secured by an unelected body behaving beyond its constitutional authority. It was not ratified by any parliament. Crucially, the loose premise that this agreement was built upon, begs the question -- was it really a necessity?
The hidden costs of the fine print
Lets move onto the appendices.
The provisions on digital trade and third-party partnerships are where the hostage situation becomes more suffocating.
For instance, the restrictions on engagement with "non-market economies," or countries that do not submit to the American State systems and logics, is not simply a loyalty oath. They are Washington's attempt to direct Bangladesh's foreign policy from the Oval Office.
To ensure that a nation of 170 million, holding a strategic geography, and a young, desperate labour force, remains within the gravitational hegemonic orbit of American capital and American geopolitical calculation.
The "poison pill" clauses that penalize economic relationships with nations outside the American sphere of approval are a mechanism for maintaining the satrapy that formal colonialism could no longer sustain.
This is what Sheldon Wolin, writing about inverted totalitarianism, recognized as the signature move of the corporate empire.
Whether one labels this as neocolonialism, the control here is exercised through such contracts, not through the barrel of a gun but through the fine print of an agreement signed in a windowless room by men who answer to no electorate bodies.
Let us be honest, Boeing does not care about the sovereignty of Bangladesh. The LNG conglomerates do not lose sleep over the constitutional questions raised by Article 145A.
American agribusiness did not include a clause in its lobbying budgets for the democratic aspirations of the Bangladeshi people. They care about markets, about access, about the elimination of competition, and about the security of long-term purchase commitments.
The ART delivers all of this. That it also delivers Bangladesh into a generation of constrained choices and eroded autonomy is, from their perspective, not a cost. It is the point.
Ratification, legitimacy, and parliamentary duty
The incoming parliament must understand what it is ratifying. It was not being asked to review a trade agreement but rather, to legitimize a constitutional violation, to provide democratic cover for a process that was deliberately designed to circumvent democratic deliberation, and to inherit the obligations of an unelected government that mistook the silence of a transition for a mandate to transform.
A treaty born in a constitutional vacuum, during one of Bangladesh’s most vulnerable, and darkest moments, justified by a legal doctrine designed to eliminate accountability. And signed without the knowledge or consent of the people it binds.
This is not a treaty. It is an instrument of coercion dressed in diplomatic language. The new parliament has not merely the right to dismantle it. It has the obligation.
The revolution that brought Tarique Rahman’s government to power did not occur so that one form of autocracy could be exchanged for a corporate-managed arrangement in which critical decisions are made in Washington.
Conditions agreed in the boardrooms of energy conglomerates, in the offices of agricultural lobbyists that do not hold Bangladesh’s interest. The Bangladeshi people did not pour into the streets to achieve the freedom to be more efficiently subordinated to the requirements of a dying American Empire.
If we do not reclaim what has been signed away, we will discover, as subordinate states always discover, that the art of the deal belongs entirely to the dealer. The ART, like Trump's book, is a monument to someone else's leverage. And we are the ones who bought it.
Abdullah Rubaet Chowdhury is a Social Scientist, and currently an Advisor at the Global Knowledge Initiative, a Washington DC based non-profit organization. He is the former Proctor of BRAC University. He can be reached at robin.chw@gmail.com. Views expressed are the writer’s own.