Trump’s 500% tariff gambit: Washington risks an undeclared economic war with the Global South

There are wars that begin with missiles and those that begin with memos. Donald Trump’s 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. Britain’s imperial unraveling did not begin with Suez in 1956, but with decades of imperial overreach masked as order-keeping. The Trump administration now risks repeating that error—confusing coercion for leadership, tariffs for diplomacy, and punishment for persuasion.

Let us be clear about what is happening. By empowering the US president to impose tariffs of at least 500 percent on countries that continue to buy Russian oil, Washington is not just sanctioning Moscow. It is sanctioning the economic reality of the Global South. India, China, Brazil—large, sovereign economies with legitimate energy needs—are being told that their domestic priorities must bow to Washington’s geopolitical timetable. That is not alliance management. It is economic extortion.

India’s case is especially instructive. For decades, New Delhi has been courted as a strategic counterweight to China. It is a member of the Quad, a defense partner, and a democracy with its own complicated security calculus. Yet under Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff

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