Will Bangladesh bring Trump’s new crisis? |
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........