No malice, but more muscle
Long before the current fires in Ukraine and Iran forced global powers to rethink the architecture of state survival, Bangladesh experienced its own geopolitical D-Day.
On 25 August 2017, Myanmar’s military—shielded by the moral defense of a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Aung San Suu Kyi—orchestrated a campaign of terror that drove over 740,000 Rohingya across the border.
In Dhaka, the nation watched with a mix of heartbreak, disbelief, and strategic helplessness. National sovereignty was tested in the most telling way imaginable: a neighboring state had effectively dumped its targeted population, the Rohingya Muslim minority, onto Bangladeshi soil, aware that Dhaka lacked the power to resist.
Rather than treating this existential breach as a wake-up call, the then-Awami League administration and their fascist leader, Sheikh Hasina, chose PR over strategy. Bereft of a popular mandate following the rigged 2014 elections, the government tried to spin a tragic humanitarian crisis into a bizarre lobbying effort to secure a Nobel Peace Prize for one of the world's brutal dictators.
The military junta in Naypyidaw got away with one of the century's most brazen acts of genocide—and a direct assault on a neighbor's border integrity—because they knew Bangladesh was militarily weak. The size of the Myanmar military was more than twice the size of Dhaka's armed forces.
They recognized that Dhaka possessed no strategic deterrence. Though Bangladesh’s population outnumbered Myanmar’s by more than three to one, its armed forces were no match for a battle-hardened war machine that operated with impunity.
The structural failure went deeper than military neglect. The Awami League regime outsourced its core foreign policy to a regional neighbor. But that neighbor’s priority was not Dhaka’s sovereign defense; it was securing its own strategic concessions from Naypyidaw while ensuring Bangladesh remained a compliant client state. Dhaka was nudged to prioritize the security concerns of its larger neighbours rather than building a genuine posture of self-reliance.
At the same time, Beijing, which has been trying to woo Dhaka to its orbit for decades, offered no shield. Though Xi Jinping’s historic visit to Dhaka in 2016 had brought multi-billion-dollar infrastructure deals, China’s primary interest remained its own strategic access to the Bay of Bengal.
When Dhaka pulled out of the proposed Sonadia deep-sea port project under pressure from competing regional and global hegemons, Beijing’s diplomatic leverage in the Rohingya crisis dissolved into transactional neutrality.
Recent global conflicts have exposed the fantasy of relying on foreign benefactors. Ukraine’s ongoing ordeal demonstrates the limits of international support: despite receiving tens of billions of dollars in NATO weaponry, Kyiv remains locked in a war of attrition against an aggressive neighbor, bearing immense economic and human costs. As things shape up, it is now clear that Ukraine would end up being a rump state, ceding more than a third of its territory to Russia.
In the Middle East, the escalation of regional warfare has shattered another long-held illusion: that purchasing foreign hardware guarantees security. Gulf states that spent hundreds of billions on American and Western systems found that transactional alliances provide limited protection when conflict erupts.
Hosting tens of thousands of American troops and dozens of US bases now appears to be a liability for petro-rich nations. They have also woken up to a new reality: Israel's growing expansionist move. They have seen how powerful Western nations went silent when Israel committed a genocide in front of everyone's eyes.
This reality explains the emergence of the Mecca Pact—an effort to combine Saudi financial resources, Turkey’s advanced defense-manufacturing ecosystem, and Pakistan’s strategic military capacity. For Bangladesh, which has reportedly been invited to join, the arrangement offers a path forward.
While Dhaka brings modest military weight to such an alliance today, membership would open critical avenues for defense modernization. Deepening defense-industrial partnerships with Ankara and Islamabad could accelerate Bangladesh's ability to produce indigenous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and low-cost precision strike capabilities, including technology to produce ballistic missiles—the essential components of modern deterrence, proved vital both for Ukraine and Iran.
Similarly, Bangladesh must give serious consideration to the proposed quadrilateral security dialogue involving Beijing, Islamabad and Naypyidaw. Pakistan's top ministers made several high-profile visits to Bangladesh with the offer during the Interim Government.
The Professor Yunus-led administration rightly deferred long-term binding treaties to a future elected government, but the strategic logic remains compelling: a small nation surrounded by complex geopolitical rivalries cannot afford to remain perpetually unaligned and undefended.
It is true that Bangladesh has long prized its foundational doctrine of "friendship to all, malice to none." But increasingly it sounds like a strategy of a weak nation that does not have a good friend. In a new multipolar era, where the US is reluctant to play the role of global police and where international law routinely yields to hard power, neutrality without deterrence is an invitation to coercion.
The year 2017 proved that moral high ground does not defend a border. The same disastrous scene can be played out anytime in the future along our massive border. If Bangladesh wishes to safeguard its sovereignty over the coming decades, it must stop treating national defense as a diplomatic afterthought and begin building the hard power necessary to ensure its borders are never violated again.
Joining the Mecca Pact could be the beginning of this new era in our national security. It will be a first step towards a new and proud Bangladesh.
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Shafiqul Alam is the Editor of Daily Waadaa