There’s a particular craftiness to the way America’s latest trade offensive has been packaged. The Office of the United States Trade Representative has concluded a sweeping investigation into 60 economies -- not for dumping cheap steel, not for currency manipulation, not for the usual sins of the global trading order. The accusation this time is something more damning: complicity in forced labour.
Who, after all, wants to be seen defending this sin?
Strip away the moral scaffolding, and what emerges is a remarkably sharp protectionist instrument -- one that could redraw the economics of global manufacturing more decisively than any blunt tariff wall.
The USTR’s allegation against Bangladesh tells us everything we need to know about how this new doctrine works. Washington’s conclusion is twofold: Dhaka has neither passed a law prohibiting the import of goods produced with forced labour, nor does it meaningfully enforce any such restriction in practice. In the dry language of US trade law, these alleged failures are seen as “unreasonable”, and that single word is the trigger for potential punitive action.
The economic logic, once you see it, is clever. When a country’s factories source cotton, aluminium, electronics, lithium-ion batteries, or rice from supply chains tainted by coercion, they are, Washington argues, effectively receiving an invisible subsidy. They skip the compliance costs, the auditing, the due diligence paper trail that American producers must navigate. The resulting garments, processed fish, palm oil, and polysilicon then sail into American ports at prices that legitimate producers simply can’t match. The playing field, in other words, was never level, as the American argument suggests.
None of this, it should be said, is entirely new. The US has actually banned the import of goods made with forced labour since 1930. And in 2021, Congress went further, passing a law that says all products from China’s Xinjiang region are considered to be made with forced labour unless proven otherwise.
What is new is the urgency and the legal context driving it. The Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a significant embarrassment in February, ruling that the sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs unveiled on April 2, 2025 were unconstitutional. Those duties, conjured through the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, have not merely been struck down; the government has been ordered to repay them.
Washington needed a new legal hook for its tariff ambitions, and fast. Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 -- an older, sturdier statute -- was ready and waiting. Forced labour, it turns out, is not just a moral cause. It is a very convenient workaround.
Bangladesh is not alone in the dock. The USTR’s net has been cast remarkably wide and snares some of America’s closest allies and largest trading partners. The European Union is implicated. So is the United Kingdom. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan -- anchor partners in America’s own Indo-Pacific strategy -- have not been spared scrutiny either. When Washington can threaten Brussels and Tokyo in the same breath as Dhaka and Phnom Penh, the framework looks like a new universal standard -- one written in Washington, enforced by Washington, and appealed to in Washington.
However, not all the accused are treated equally.
The framework is tiered. Entirely uncooperative countries face a 12.5 percent duty. Bangladesh, however, earns a modest reprieve: it has made commitments under the reciprocal trade agreement around forced-labour import prohibitions, and that diplomatic goodwill has landed Dhaka in the 10 percent bracket alongside Argentina, Ecuador, and Malaysia.
It is, in its way, a calibrated system of incentives. Sign on to America’s supply-chain decoupling agenda, or pay the full price. The message to the rest of the world is equally clear: alignment is rewarded, resistance is taxed.
Washington doesn’t seem overly impressed by Dhaka’s commitments. The USTR’s conclusion is unambiguous: present practices in Bangladesh are unreasonable, and Chattogram port is not doing enough. The trade deal bought Dhaka a discount. Not an acquittal.
The timing, for Bangladesh, could scarcely be worse. The country is already absorbing the fallout of the Iran war, which has sent energy costs surging -- a particular cruelty for a manufacturing economy that runs on imported fuel. Shipping lanes through the Gulf have tightened, freight premiums have spiked, and the cost of running a garment factory floor has climbed. Now, a 10 percent additional penalty looms on the horizon.
The saving grace is that none of this is final yet. The tariffs remain proposed, not enacted. Written comments to the USTR are open until July 6. A public hearing follows on July 7. There is, in other words, a narrow window and Dhaka would be wise enough to use it.
But the deeper lesson here transcends any single hearing or deadline. The era when supply-chain opacity was a competitive advantage is over. Washington has decided that what happens in a Xinjiang cotton field, or a Malaysian glove factory, or a fishing trawler in the South China Sea, is now very much America’s business, and it intends to price that conviction into every shipment that crosses its borders.
The wall the US is building isn’t made of steel or concrete but of compliance paperwork, and it may prove far harder to climb.
