The recently held parliamentary election in Bangladesh was watched more closely than usual. More than 330 international observers were accredited—over twice the number present in the 2024 election—reflecting a moment of suspended judgement rather than routine election monitoring. In the current international order, elections are just the beginning in a long order of assessments. What happens post-polls matters just as much. Some of the most consequential judgements will not be made at home but elsewhere, as neighbours adjust their expectations, markets weigh risk, and foreign partners decide whether the next government’s assurances are meant to last.
The formation of the new government has confirmed the transition from spectacle to scrutiny. The early days of a new administration rarely produce policy manifests. They produce something more revealing: intent and indications. External partners often read these cues before they read statements.
The pressures shaping Bangladesh’s foreign policy are less about ideological bent than structure. Neighbourhood stability now rests more on predictability, rather than sentiment. Market access is filtered through social compliance, regulatory credibility, and reputational risk. Infrastructure finance is assessed against political volatility. Labour migration depends on formal diplomatic negotiation rather than informal accommodation. These relationships are no longer moored in affinity. They are governed by constant evaluation.
What has changed is not simply the country’s external environment, but the nature of foreign policy itself. It no longer operates primarily through bilateral courtesies or summit diplomacy, but is increasingly mediated through investment decisions, compliance benchmarks, grant conditionalities, and strategic supply-chain positioning. Diplomacy today is conducted as much through markets, regulators, investors and diasporas as through embassies. This is why foreign policy now reaches factory floors, remittance corridors and regulatory desks long before it reaches press briefings. The diplomatic arena itself has shifted from corridor negotiations among officials to networked engagement involving investors, institutions, civil society, and transnational communities. In this environment, traditional definitions of foreign policy become insufficient. Navigation depends increasingly on alignment choices.
Early external responses suggest cautious continuity. Several of the country’s key regional partners, such as India, China, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, along with the US, have already issued formal congratulations to the new government. While such gestures are routine in diplomatic practice, they also indicate that channels remain open and expectations remain in play.
But foreign policy today is shaped less by gestures than by the capacity to behave consistently once political theatrics end. Few issues test that capacity more starkly than Myanmar.
The Rohingya crisis is no longer a temporary humanitarian emergency. It has become a permanent diplomatic condition for Bangladesh, exposing the limitations of multilateralism and the costs of prolonged deferral. Meanwhile, the strain on national security, public finances, and social cohesion persists.
This is no longer a question of alignment, but whether Bangladesh has the administrative capability to sustain what it has undertaken. Hosting the Rohingya population has already significantly impacted its security posture and coffers. The issue now is whether that endurance risks slipping into normalisation.
This is where foreign policy intersects most directly with domestic governance. Keeping the Rohingya issue internationalised requires sustained diplomatic efforts. It demands the ability to pursue justice, humanitarian financing, and risk management, without allowing any one track to drift into symbolism.
In this context, many in Bangladesh will regard early clarity on a Myanmar engagement strategy as a measure of leadership acumen.
There is another lesson to be learnt here. In the years preceding its 2022 economic collapse, Sri Lanka experienced a gradual erosion of external confidence: rising debt, repeated credit-rating downgrades, delayed engagement with multilateral lenders, and shrinking access to capital markets. Long before shortages appeared on the streets, options were already thinning. Trust withdrew before diplomacy intervened.
The relevance of this comparison is structural. It shows how external judgement precedes formal crisis and how sovereignty can be hollowed out gradually when institutional capacity misalign with external expectations.
Bangladesh’s position is different. The point is not that the fundamentals are identical; it’s about sequence: how credibility erodes before collapse, and how foreign policy options narrow long before crisis is acknowledged.
In such an environment, strategic partnership is less a declaration of alignment than an exercise in calibrated balance. For Bangladesh, this requires sustaining working equilibrium among its major relationships, particularly with India, China and the US, without allowing engagement with one to be read as positioning against another. Durable diplomacy rarely rests on extracting concessions at a counterpart’s expense; it rests on structuring cooperation so participation remains rational for all sides. A foreign policy that places national interest first succeeds through agreements whose stability serves every participant. Upcoming negotiations such as the renewal of the Ganges water treaty with India will offer an early indication of how effectively this balance can be maintained in practice. The Bangladesh-US deal, signed in a rush just days before the election, can also serve as an opportunity for the government to prove its mettle if, in light of recent developments, it can re-open negotiations with the US to work out a more favourable path for Bangladesh.
Initial remarks from the new administration has emphasised continuity, procedural engagement and dialogue with all partners rather than immediate strategic pronouncements. Such language is characteristic of governments seeking to stabilise external expectations before articulating doctrine.
A public mandate may open doors. How long they stay open depends on credibility. And credibility is built over time and tested under uneven circumstances. Transitions test not the strength of mandates but the discipline of systems. Elections redistribute authority. Governance determines whether that authority stabilises or thins. The world rarely reacts to declarations. It reacts to patterns. That is usually where the real verdict begins.
Our foreign policy will not be judged by intent alone. It will be judged by whether markets, migration partners, and multilateral institutions continue to treat Bangladesh as a country whose commitments survive political change. Foreign policy is no longer something governments conduct abroad. It is something states perform continuously at home.
Tasneem Tayeb is a columnist for The Daily Star. Her X handle is @tasneem_tayeb.
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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