An unexpected second-term crisis for President Donald Trump may unfold this week in Bangladesh.
The story starts in July 2024, when student protests erupted that grew alongside the aggressive force applied to crush them. Perhaps 1,000 people died in clashes that culminated in Sheikh Hasina, Bangladesh’s elected prime minister and the daughter of the country’s founder, fleeing to India. The Biden administration sided with the students. Like President Jimmy Carter’s approach to Iran’s shah, Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken and national security adviser Jake Sullivan allowed their personal hostility to Hasina to cloud their assessment and skew their analysis. They readily believed a false narrative that “autocratic dictator kills innocent students.” By the time ballistics showed that the students were not entirely innocent and that some had fired on security forces with Pakistan-supplied ammunition, it was too late.
After Hasina’s ouster, Jamaat-e-Islami emerged as the major power, using Muhammad Yunus, a 2006 Nobel Peace Laureate, as their frontman. Yunus was the perfect face for the West. He has had a long friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton and is a frequent speaker for the Clinton Global Initiative. He is also a member of the Elders, a collection of former global officials that purport to stand for human rights and international law, which counted the late Carter and Nelson Mandela as members.
But there is dissonance between Yunus’s public image and how Bangladeshi people know him. He has long harbored a grudge against Hasina’s secularist Awami League, rooted in his former desire to set up a competing political party as well as her government’s investigation of corruption allegations against him, charges for which there was evidence but which he dismissed as motivated by Nobel Prize envy.
After Yunus took up Bangladesh’s interim leadership, he released convicted terrorists from prison and normalized Islamist extremists who targeted Bangladesh’s small Christian and Hindu minorities. His police arrested politicians who had protected minorities and stood up to Islamism. In effect, he acted like Burmese politician and former Nobel Laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, whose luster evaporated upon exposure of her intolerance toward minorities. Yunus’s team set elections for Thursday, but banned the Awami League, giving Bangladeshis a choice between radical Islamists and other radical Islamists, but no secular alternative.
The State Department so far appears asleep at the switch. Recently, a tape recording emerged featuring the current U.S. embassy political officer in Dhaka begging students for introductions to Jamaat-e-Islami, a radical group on the verge of power. The former U.S deputy chief of mission has acted as an undeclared lobbyist for Jamaat-e-Islami, laundering a terrorist-sympathizing party, if not suggesting U.S support. So too does the Monday U.S.-Bangladesh trade agreement.
The question is now whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio recognizes the danger that Bangladesh now represents or whether he defers to the lazy State Department algorithm that too often congratulates countries on elections, no matter how fraudulent.
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Rubio should make clear that there can be no legitimacy to elections when an unelected official bans the largest party, nor do politicians ban mainstream parties unless they feel they will lose in a competitive election. Much is at stake. With a population approaching 200 million, a terrorism-supporting Bangladesh, hostile to the United States, India, and religious freedom, would be a game-changer.
The Islamist takeover of Bangladesh will be as consequential to South Asia as Iran’s revolution was to the Middle East.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.