Analysis and commentary on Bangladesh's political economy, foreign policy, and strategic affairs.
The Bay of Bengal emerges as a critical theater in great power competition during 2026, with Bangladesh navigating between Chinese investment offers and Indian security concerns while asserting its own maritime sovereignty.
India's Northeast — the 'Seven Sisters' with 40 million people — is connected to the Indian mainland by only a 22 km strip of land. Dhaka holds the key to solving India's geographic nightmare, but Bangladesh has never leveraged this advantage. The post-August 2024 era demands strategic recalibration.
Major global powers have historically viewed Bangladesh not as an independent actor but through an 'India lens' — treating Dhaka as a subset of Delhi policy. This prism distorts how Washington, Tokyo, Moscow, and Brussels engage with a nation of 170 million, but post-August 2024 dynamics are forcing a recalibration.
Moscow 'generally defers to Delhi on matters concerning its neighbors' — a pattern so pronounced that no Soviet/Russian foreign minister visited Bangladesh until 2023, 52 years after independence. The Rooppur nuclear plant exemplifies this triangulated relationship.
Japan has invested billions in Bangladesh infrastructure — but Tokyo's strategic framework explicitly conceptualizes these investments as serving India connectivity. The question for Dhaka: can Japanese investment be reframed as bilateral partnership rather than triangulated development?
The 2025 shift in US policy from treating Bangladesh as a subset of India policy to engaging Dhaka on its own terms represents a potential paradigm shift — but whether it survives the next administration remains uncertain.
India's alleged support for separatist elements in Bangladesh's Chittagong Hill Tracts—combined with harboring Awami League fugitives—risks reigniting insurgencies in Northeast India that took decades to contain.
Analysis of why India's approach to Bangladesh will differ fundamentally from Russia's Ukraine invasion—and the destabilization methods Dhaka should prepare to counter.
BJP's Hindu nationalist project mirrors the authoritarian decay that consumed Awami League Bangladesh. When electoral defeats come—and they will—the manufactured hatred toward Pakistan and China, though politically useful, is militarily unactionable. This creates dangerous pressure for 'manageable' conflicts, making limited strikes and potential false flag operations the preferred tools of a declining regime.