By Shiamak Ali/The Daily Times of Bangladesh

Kuala Lumpur, April 21 – The Reciprocal Trade Agreement between Bangladesh and the United States was signed on 9 February 2026, in the waning days of the Yunus-led interim administration and on the eve of a national election.

Presented as a reciprocal trade agreement, this document appears at first glance to carry the appearance of a conventional bilateral arrangement: tariffs adjusted, market access widened, commercial ties deepened. But that appearance does not survive serious scrutiny.

On closer reading, the agreement extends well beyond trade in any narrow or ordinary sense. It reaches into Bangladesh’s regulatory discretion, import management, standards regime, digital governance, procurement behaviour, and future strategic flexibility in dealing with third countries.
That is precisely what makes it so consequential — and precisely why it should alarm Bangladesh.

The central issue is not whether the agreement may yield some isolated commercial benefit. The principal issue is that Bangladesh, under the banner of reciprocal trade, is being asked to concede forms of leverage and policy latitude that no serious state should part with lightly — because their full value often becomes apparent only after they have been lost.

This is not a peripheral concern arising at the margins of the text. Rather, it is very much woven into the structure of the agreement itself.

Trade agreements are often defended in the neutral vocabulary of efficiency, openness, and reform. In this case, that language obscures more than it clarifies. This is not merely a document about reducing barriers at the border. It is an agreement through which the United States appears to secure a much wider set of advantages: preferential treatment across regulatory recognition, tighter discipline on Bangladesh’s licensing powers, deeper access in agriculture, influence over digital and data-related policy, cooperation tied to sanctions and export controls, and leverage over Bangladesh’s future strategic and economic engagements with other states.

Bangladesh, by contrast, appears to assume the far heavier burden of adjustment. That is what makes the agreement so serious. What is being negotiated here is not simply trade access. It is the narrowing of Bangladesh’s economic sovereignty through clauses technical enough to dull public attention but consequential enough to reshape the country’s room for manoeuvre for years to come.

From a Bangladeshi perspective, the most important question is also the simplest: what precisely is being gained here that justifies the breadth of what is being conceded?

The architecture of the agreement is difficult to ignore. Bangladesh is asked to liberalize, recognize, align, restrain, and adapt across an unusually wide range of domains. The United States, meanwhile, offers narrower concessions, retains broader interpretive latitude, and preserves the ability to restore tariff pressure should it judge Bangladesh to be non-compliant.

That is not an incidental feature of the text. Rather, it is one of its defining characteristics. For that reason, this agreement should not be read as a routine commercial instrument. In substance, it reads far more like an arrangement in which market access is used as the vehicle through which deeper asymmetries of leverage are formalized.

Having been signed just days before a national election, would already have been enough to invite suspicion. Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman—then serving as the national security adviser—rejected claims that the process was rushed, arguing that it was not done “in the dark” and that BNP and Jamaat had consented before the deal was finalised.

If that is so, the political implications are not reassuring. They suggest that while the public was denied meaningful transparency over an agreement of profound strategic consequence, channels of consent may already have been secured among elite actors beyond public view, then defended after the fact as though secrecy were itself a substitute for legitimacy.

That suspicion only deepens once the internal logic of the agreement is followed clause by clause. The imbalance becomes resoundingly explicit in the enforcement provisions.

Article 6.4 makes clear that if the United States considers Bangladesh to be in non-compliance, it may seek consultations and, failing a satisfactory outcome, reimpose the reciprocal tariff rate on certain or all Bangladeshi imports. The same provision underscores that nothing in the agreement constrains either party from imposing additional tariffs to address unfair trade practices, import surges, or economic and national security concerns consistent with its law.

In theory, such language appears bilateral. In practice, it is the United States that enters the agreement with the greater coercive capacity, the greater market power, and the broader ability to define non-compliance on terms Bangladesh would struggle to resist.

This is why the enforcement clause matters so much. It is not merely a legal fallback but the mechanism through which the wider asymmetry of the agreement is preserved. Bangladesh is expected to liberalize, harmonize, and restrict itself across multiple domains, while Washington retains the right to restore pressure whenever it judges those concessions to have been insufficiently observed.

If the document were limited to such commercial imbalance, it would already warrant concern. But the agreement does not stop there. It repeatedly crosses into terrain far more strategic in character, where the issue is no longer simply trade access, but the gradual conditioning of Bangladesh’s future choices.

Article 4.1 is among the clearest examples. It provides that if the United States adopts a border measure or other trade action that it considers relevant to protecting its economic or national security, Bangladesh, after consultations, shall adopt or maintain a complementary restrictive measure in support of that U.S. action. The importance of this clause cannot be understated. It does not merely ask Bangladesh to respect a bilateral arrangement with Washington, but it asks Bangladesh to align itself with restrictive actions taken in defence of U.S. interests, including against third-country actors.

In substance, Bangladesh is being drawn into an obligation to support elements of the American strategic trade posture, not because its own security necessarily requires it, but because the United States has determined that its own does.

Article 4.2 pushes that logic further. Bangladesh is required to cooperate with the United States in regulating national security-sensitive technologies and goods through existing export control regimes, to harmonize its export control framework with U.S. controls, and to ensure that Bangladeshi companies do not “backfill or undermine” those controls.

More strikingly still, Bangladesh is to cooperate with the United States with a view toward restricting transactions that would violate U.S. sanctions or export controls if they had occurred in the United States or by a U.S. person. Here the agreement ceases to look merely intrusive and begins to look openly disciplinary.

Bangladesh is not simply being asked to abide by its own laws or by multilateral rules to which it has consented. It is being encouraged to internalize, and to act in support of a sanctions and export-control architecture whose underlying reference point is Washington’s strategic judgment.

For a smaller state, this is not a technical concession. It is a narrowing of geopolitical room, especially in a time where it heavily relies on fuel imports from the Gulf region. It increases the probability that future commercial and diplomatic decisions will have to be filtered not only through Bangladesh’s own interests, but through the anticipated tolerances of the United States.

That same pattern is visible in the agreement’s treatment of Bangladesh’s future engagements with other states. Article 3.2 provides that if Bangladesh enters into a new digital trade agreement with a country that jeopardizes essential U.S. interests, the United States may terminate the agreement and reimpose the reciprocal tariff.

Article 4.3 mirrors this logic in broader economic terms, allowing Washington to terminate the agreement if Bangladesh later enters into a bilateral free trade agreement or preferential economic agreement with a “non-market country” that undermines the present arrangement.

These are extraordinary provisions, not because great powers do not seek influence, but because the influence here is being codified in a trade instrument. Bangladesh is not merely undertaking obligations vis-à-vis the United States. It is accepting clauses that shadow its future diplomacy with third countries.

For a country situated at the intersection of competing external pressures, such clauses are not incidental. They go to the heart of strategic flexibility itself. Smaller states preserve equilibrium by maintaining optionality. This agreement appears designed, at multiple points, to reduce that optionality in advance.

Perhaps nowhere is the strategic overreach more naked than in Article 4.3(5), which states that Bangladesh shall not purchase nuclear reactors, fuel rods, or enriched uranium from a country that jeopardizes essential U.S. interests, subject only to narrow exceptions tied to existing proprietary materials or prior contracts.

It is difficult to overstate what is being normalized here. A document presented as a reciprocal trade agreement is being used to influence Bangladesh’s sovereign procurement choices in one of the most strategic sectors any state can possess: long-term energy infrastructure.

The operative test is not whether a supplier serves Bangladesh’s national interest, nor whether the choice is lawful under international obligations, but whether that supplier jeopardizes “essential U.S. interests.”

That is a remarkable standard to insert into a bilateral commercial agreement. It reveals, with unusual clarity, the underlying ambition of the text: not simply to facilitate exchange, but to embed American strategic preferences into Bangladesh’s decision-making architecture.

This agreement should be understood for what it is: not a routine commercial compact, but a structurally unequal instrument through which Bangladesh is asked to trade away leverage for limited and conditional relief.

The real question is not only what Bangladesh may gain in the short term, but what it may cease to control in the longer term. That is where the true cost lies.

And because that cost is so serious, accountability cannot end at the document itself. Those who negotiated it, enabled it, consented to it behind closed doors, or sought to push it through at a moment of maximum political thinness must also be subjected to scrutiny.

If Bangladeshis are being asked to bear the consequences of such an agreement, they are entitled to know exactly who was prepared to bargain away so much in their name.

(Shiamak Ali is a writer on geopolitics and international affairs and a researcher for a Chinese think tank)