Six months into his premiership, Tarique Rahman is presiding over the most consequential recalibration of Bangladeshi foreign policy in a generation. His Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) swept the February 12, 2026 election with roughly two-thirds of parliamentary seats, ending eighteen months of interim governance under Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. Thereby, Rahman and his new government inherited a foreign-policy inbox no Bangladeshi government has faced quite this way: an India relationship fractured since the 2024 fall of Sheikh Hasina, a China relationship dramatically deepened during the interim period, a newly signed and contested trade pact with Washington, a resurgent Islamist opposition watching the government’s every move toward New Delhi, and a Rakhine State next door no longer fully governed by Myanmar’s military at all.
Rahman has answered this inbox with a single organising phrase: ‘Bangladesh First,’ repeated at nearly every turn, from the BNP’s election manifesto to the Prime Minister’s parliamentary remarks after returning from Beijing. The phrase is easy to dismiss as campaign branding. The more interesting question is whether it can function as an actual doctrine and what that doctrine reveals about the strategic room Bangladesh really has in a Bay of Bengal now contested by China, India and the United States alike.
Defining the ‘Bangladesh First’ Doctrine
“Bangladesh First” can be articulated in four major but broader interpretations as per its 2026 Election Manifesto. These include that foreign policy should be judged by its returns to ordinary Bangladeshis rather than ideological alignment; that sovereignty and reciprocity, not deference to any single power, should govern bilateral relationships; that economic diplomacy, including exports, remittances, investment, and technology transfer is inseparable from security policy; and that Dhaka should extract comparable benefit from every major partner rather than backing its future on one. The party’s manifesto framed this around sovereignty, security and public welfare, promising relations built on equality and mutual respect while expanding the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ (MOFA) diplomatic capacity.
Analysts covering Rahman’s China visit have read three calculations into the slogan. These are counterbalancing the Islamist right at home, maintaining rough equidistance between Washington and Beijing, and driving a harder bargain with India than the previous Awami League government ever attempted. That reading suggests “Bangladesh First” is less a fixed doctrine than a flexible framing device. The vision is coherent enough to guide individual decisions but not yet institutionalised into a strategic culture that would survive a change of government. Whether it hardens into the former or remains the latter is the central test of Rahman’s foreign policy.
Delhi and Dhaka: Recalibration, Not Rupture
Nowhere is the doctrine under more scrutiny than in the relationship with India. Ties collapsed after Hasina’s ouster, with visa suspensions, security and intelligence estrangement and mutual recrimination replacing what had been the Awami League’s tightly managed partnership with New Delhi. The thaw began with grief rather than diplomacy when India’s External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar travelled to Dhaka in December 2025 to attend the funeral of Rahman’s mother, former prime minister Khaleda Zia, delivering a condolence letter from Narendra Modi. India sent a senior delegation to Rahman’s swearing-in, restored visa services, and hosted Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman in New Delhi in April for talks with Jaishankar, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval.
Yet by August 2026, Rahman was reportedly declining a bilateral visit and set to skip the September BRICS Outreach Summit being invited as the head of the Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC). Dhaka has particularly conditioned further warmth on bilateral ties based on accelerating Sheikh Hasina’s extradition process. It also indicates that Bangladesh wants tangible reciprocity on the stalled Teesta water-sharing treaty, expanded connectivity, and fuel supply before extending the political gestures New Delhi seeks. India’s position, meanwhile, has shifted from treating Bangladesh as a dependable junior partner to actively courting a government it no longer unconditionally influences. This is transactional recalibration rather than zero-sum rivalry.
Beijing’s Embrace and Washington’s Terms
If relations vis-à-vis India are being managed cautiously, relations with China have moved fastest. Rahman’s first overseas tour took him to Malaysia and then China in June 2026, where four days of talks produced fifteen memoranda of understanding, roughly USD 300 million in Chinese grant assistance, and an agreement to launch a 2+2 foreign-and-defence-ministerial dialogue elevating the relationship to what both governments now call a ‘community with a shared future’. Beijing secured development rights to the Mongla Port Economic Zone, reversing an earlier allocation to an Indian operator, alongside a new industrial zone near Chattogram and renewed momentum on the long-stalled Teesta River restoration project. China is already Bangladesh’s largest trading partner and principal arms supplier, having built the naval base near Chattogram and delivered submarines and frigates, bolstering a defence relationship Rahman’s government has chosen to deepen rather than diversify away from.
In contrast, the relationship with Washington presents a starker dilemma. The interim government signed a reciprocal trade agreement with the United States on February 9, 2026, days before the election, locking in a 19 percent tariff on most Bangladeshi goods with duty-free access for select categories, in exchange for binding commitments on regulatory alignment, procurement and “national and regional economic security matters”. A White House letter soon after Rahman’s inauguration urged Dhaka to take decisive action on pending defence agreements, an explicit bundling of trade access with security alignment that critics in Dhaka call a serious constraint on economic sovereignty. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling weakening the underlying tariff framework has since complicated the deal’s legal footing, giving Rahman’s government an opening to seek renegotiation. Yet, Bangladesh cannot simply walk away from its largest single export market as it approaches graduation from least-developed-country status.
Together, the China and U.S. relationships illustrate the practical shape of ‘equidistance’. Dhaka’s current approach revolves around deepening economic and defence ties with Beijing while trying to preserve Washington’s market access without fully absorbing the security conditions attached to it.
Islamabad, the Gulf and the Muslim World
Relations with Pakistan accelerated rapidly under Yunus-led interim government during which direct flights between the two countries resumed, visa procedures eased, and military delegations exchanged. Rahman appears set to normalise trade and diplomatic ties further, while treating deeper defence cooperation with far more caution given how it would read in New Delhi and among his own party’s older generation, for whom 1971 remains politically potent. Islamabad sees genuine opportunity in a BNP government less encumbered by the Awami League’s founding narrative, even if Rahman is unlikely to make Pakistan a showcase relationship.
Further in West Asia, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has invited Rahman for his first state visit to the Kingdom, building on ties dating to the era of his father, President Ziaur Rahman, a relationship whose real weight lies in remittances and labour migration rather than geopolitics. Dhaka’s eagerness to engage with the newly established Mecca Joint Defence Agreement between Saudi Arabia, Türkiye and Pakistan further illustrates its interest in widening its security partnerships beyond its immediate neighbourhood. This is complemented by a rapidly deepening Bangladesh-Türkiye relationship. Ankara has signalled an ambition to elevate ties to a strategic level, with the two sides establishing mechanisms for annual foreign and defence consultations, exploring defence-industrial cooperation and joint production, and expanding collaboration on trade, investment and the Rohingya crisis.
For Bangladesh, one of these relationships with the above states carries the strategic weight of India, China or the United States. Rather, holistically diversified labour markets, remittances and Gulf investment as makeweight against overexposure to any single major power anchor the economic-security dimension of ‘Bangladesh First’.
Myanmar and the Bay of Bengal
The most consequential test of ‘Bangladesh First’ may not involve a great power at all, but Bangladesh’s fractured eastern neighbour, Myanmar. Dhaka hosts more than 1.2 million Rohingya refugees, with no durable repatriation solution in sight. Meanwhile, the Arakan Army (AA) now exercises effective control over much of Rakhine State, including territory directly adjoining Bangladesh. For Dhaka, Myanmar is therefore not simply a diplomatic question; it is a test of whether “Bangladesh First” can translate geopolitical realities into pragmatic policy.
Rahman’s foreign policy appears to recognise this shift. Foreign Minister Khalilur Rahman has confirmed direct contact with the AA and its political wing, the United League of Arakan, while maintaining formal channels with Myanmar’s authorities in Naypyidaw. This is less a recognition of the AA than an acknowledgement of where power is actually exercised. The AA’s release of 73 detained Bangladeshi fishermen through a formal handover to the Border Guard Bangladesh offered a small but significant demonstration of the practical value of such engagement. The message steadily indicates Bangladesh may need to deal with whoever controls its immediate borderland, regardless of who ultimately prevails in Myanmar’s civil war.
Besides, Myanmar also connects directly to Bangladesh’s wider Bay of Bengal strategy. Dhaka’s BIMSTEC chairmanship and its efforts to strengthen regional connectivity position Bangladesh as a geographic bridge between South and Southeast Asia. Chattogram and Mongla could become important nodes in emerging connectivity initiatives, including the proposed China-Myanmar-Bangladesh Economic Corridor. Yet as the Bay of Bengal becomes an arena of intensifying great-power competition, Bangladesh’s challenge is to convert geography into leverage without turning it into dependence. ‘Bangladesh First’ therefore means using BIMSTEC, and similar platforms like the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) to advance Bangladeshi maritime, connectivity, security, and economic interests, rather than allowing any single external power to define them.
Autonomy, Economics and the Limits of Sovereign Choice
The deeper tension in ‘Bangladesh First’ is between its nationalist rhetoric and Bangladesh’s structural dependencies. The country graduates from Least Developed Country (LDC) status on November 24, 2026. After that point, preferential market access built up over decades will begin to erode, characterised by an export base still overwhelmingly concentrated in Ready-Made Garments (RMG) industries and a handful of destination markets. The government has launched a new economic-diplomacy platform and is negotiating comprehensive economic partnership agreements with South Korea and the UAE precisely to cushion this transition. That agenda cannot be pursued without deep, ongoing reliance on Chinese capital and infrastructure investments, American market access, Indian connectivity and water-sharing, and Gulf remittances simultaneously, which are the opposite of unconstrained sovereignty.
Domestically, Rahman also governs alongside a resurgent Jamaat-e-Islami-led opposition alliance that won roughly a quarter of parliamentary seats. It remains the best electoral performance in the party’s history, giving Islamist and youth-nationalist voices real leverage over how tough the government’s postures toward India in particular are allowed to look. Institutional capacity further narrows the gap between rhetorical ambition and executable strategy. A foreign policy and its execution remain incoherent, particularly due to the absence of any coordinating bodies like the National Security Council and the absence of any foreign policy blue papers.
Conclusion
Six months in, Rahman’s government has not chosen between India, China and the United States. Rather, it has instead tried to extract distinct forms of value from each while withholding full commitment to any. That is the practical meaning ‘Bangladesh First’ has acquired so far: not neutrality, but a disciplined refusal to be absorbed into someone else’s strategic architecture. Whether this becomes an institutionalised doctrine of strategic autonomy or simply a description of Bangladesh’s unavoidable position between larger powers will be assessed in the coming days. For Rahman, ‘Bangladesh First’ has, so far, proven a workable slogan for navigating a crowded neighbourhood. Converting it into a doctrine that outlasts this government’s mandate is a considerably harder task and one Rahman’s prudence in action, rather than his rhetoric in theory, will ultimately decide.
Khandakar Tahmid Rejwan is a Lecturer in Global Studies and Governance (GSG) under the School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (SLASS) at the Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB). He is also a contributing analyst on Bangladesh and Myanmar at the US-based defence think tank the Jamestown Foundation.
[The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Daily Bonik Barta or the organisation they work for.]