Atif Choudhury is Founder and CEO of the US-Bangladesh NextGen Fellowship & Policy Institute, a Non-Resident Fellow at the Vanderbilt Center for Global Democracy, a Non-Academic Fellow at the University of South Carolina Rule of Law Collaborative, and an Academic Relations Strategist at the Qatar Cultural Attache Office in Washington DC.
Bangladesh rejected Israel’s recognition not because it could afford to be principled -- but because it could not afford not to be strategic. Somaliland should take note. The lesson is clear: recognition divorced from coalition-building and regional consensus can be worse than no recognition at all.
What Bangladesh lacks is not culture, talent, or stories -- but the vision and infrastructure to translate them into sustained soft power
A functional India-Bangladesh relationship -- built on mutual respect and interests -- is an economic and geo-strategic imperative. Otherwise, India’s fears of “strategic encirclement” risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.