Introduction
Not for the first time, Bangladesh finds itself in a global power-playing field. Those with a half-century rear-view mirror might recall the country’s 1971 liberation war rocking the superpower South Asia balance.1 China coincidentally opened up to global engagements,2 and as Pakistan’s two-winged artificial existence ended, so too did the anti-communism U.S. military cordon stretching from West Asia (through the Central Treaty Organization, or CENTO) to South-east Asia (through SEATO, the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization). Bangladesh quickly retreated, after liberating itself, to rehabilitate up to 10 million refugees,3 reconstruct a dilapidated infrastructure and morale, and literally escape the pangs of poverty and famine.4
In the rest of the world, both the Soviet Union and the United States made peace (with Henry Kissinger finalizing the May 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, SALT),5 China entered the power playground, a dishelming Pakistan clung even more desperately to its U.S. alliances,6 and India, having signed a Treaty of Peace, Cooperation, and Friendship with the Soviet Union in August 1971,7 quickly invited a Soviet naval visit to Madras (Chennai today), just as the U.S. Seventh Fleet prowled somewhere between the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. Many believed this to be a psychological Indian ploy to neutralize indirect U.S. involvement in the Bangladesh battlefield. India’s foe, Pakistan, helped open U.S. negotiations with China, and the Seventh Fleet could have been a morale-boosting U.S. payback. Bangladesh was liberated, superpower clashes were avoided, and every interested country began reappraising the altered status quo.
Fast-forwarding to the second twenty-first-century decade, we see a toothless “Russia” (successor to the Soviet Union), juggling South Asian options amid a different power rivalry. Its former ally, India, seeks new strategic partners as it begins to add offensive options to its historical defensive orientation. With China now replacing the Soviet Union as the central U.S. adversary, one Indian foot is planted in consolidating U.S. support, the other probing détente with China. Whether India is biding time until its own capabilities can match China’s, or due to multiple other policy-making demands, it is assessing the entire external world much more carefully now that it has abandoned its non-aligned foreign policy pillar (whether it even existed is questioned in the last chapter of this volume).
Elsewhere in South Asia, China’s more solid footings dot the political map, with its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) doing what its trade flows did for an entire generation8: sprawl out globally, but instead of funding new markets or resource-acquiring locations, consolidating them into long-term partnerships. Many of them involve infrastructure-building, based on Chinese loans carrying higher interest rates than in the international market. In response, India began floating its own economic and technological know-how packages externally.9 If the 2017 summer Doklam stand-off between the two countries is any guide, a growing global presence cannot but culminate in confrontation between each other at some point. As an increasingly blunted extant superpower, the United States is catching up (being reactive), more than setting the pace (being proactive). Each of the three potential/actual powers has its own local cheerleading local country.
External contenders/partners, and how other South Asian countries, driven by domestic interests, pitch themselves in this tussle, will shape the outcome. Distinguishing the “outside-in” from the “inside-out” helps navigate this playing field, with an accent on Bangladesh. These approaches were frequently used Cold War, power-based, theory-related categories.10 Accordingly, those who believe national interests to be the critical determinant rally to realism theory (the “inside-out” view), while those who believe the global power distribution system to be that determinant embrace neo-realism (the “outside-in” counterpart).
Bangladesh’s predicament lies here. It is not at all keen on any power rivalry, since export-led growth has become its top priority, giving it an “inside-out” inclination sans the military. Yet, since global competition is crucial to its export fate, it cannot but be sensitive to “outside-in” pressures, again sans the military. This is where it gets tricky: with “outside-in” pressures increasingly taking a military tone, given China’s naval armament in its BRI shadows and India’s more transparent Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QSD) membership amid a parallel “Look/Act East” economic approach, Bangladesh must walk the economic-military borderline extra-consciously if it is angling a little too much this way (say, toward China), or that (perhaps the United States through India).
The typical post–World War II never-say-no-to-global-engagements United States suddenly stands on slippery grounds. On the one hand, it has stood up to say “no” over particular trade relations under Donald J. Trump’s presidency, demonstrating a rare “retreat” for a great/super power. Yet, on the other, it cannot withhold itself from oiling its Asian war machines, thus keeping options open for an “offensive” track. From quarantining North Korea and monitoring South China Sea developments to deploying more troops to Syria and bolstering Saudi military hardware, the United States is once again, as in 1971, fortifying its Indian Ocean Seventh Fleet. Not unlike China’s BRI economic counterpart, a QSD framework is unfolding for future Asia-Pacific patrol. It loosely aligns Australia, India, and Japan militarily through this QSD mechanism, even as U.S. Secretary of State Mark Pompeo opened a BRI counterpart, initially with a 113 billion USD offer during the summer of 2018. Many times more that amount goes into U.S. weapons-building.11
India’s “on-again, off-again” China policy approach has not dimmed QSD-type arrangements and joint exercises, but other QSD partners, Japan, for instance, have been going further, building more than trade relations, both in individual South Asian and in South-east Asian countries—in other words, around China’s rims.12 With Mahathir Mohammad returning as Malaysia’s prime minister, that too, at 92 years of age, a stiff China policy may also be brewing in Kuala Lumpur for other countries to latch on to or replicate.13 Local window-shopping, resentment, or opportunity-knocking makes China’s rim-land steadily more treacherous.
In addition to Japanese and U.S. interests in South Asia (which could become tools in any global competition), we must ignore the cumulative effects of relations of other countries in other parts of the world: each may be too small to individually sway global balances (of whatever: trade gravitation or military capabilities), but collectively they might raise eyebrows. This does not mean they must “gang” up or present themselves institutionally to matter: a number of small independent actions can still have large consequences using a variety of “soft” power instruments.14 Building or diverting trade, for example, could end up altering global flow patterns that might, in a crunch, matter.
Of course, the European Union comes to mind, given its huge market size, thereby power, even more so as the largest ready-made garments (RMG) export destination for Bangladesh, accounting for over 60% of its exports. Yet, the European Union has acted more like a global country club, armed with more membership rules and external expectations than the typical go-with-the-flow, self-seeking, and commercially catalyzed mindset and instruments. As Bangladesh is constan...