Biden's Indo-Pacific Strategy: Implications for Bangladesh and South Asian Security

The Announcement That Upset France

On September 15, 2021, the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia announced AUKUS — a trilateral security partnership under which Washington and London would help Canberra acquire nuclear-powered submarines. The announcement blindsided France, which had a $66 billion conventional submarine contract with Australia that was abruptly cancelled. Paris recalled its ambassadors from Washington and Canberra. The diplomatic rupture was significant, but it was also a statement of strategic intent: the Biden administration was willing to fracture relations with a key European ally to reorder the security architecture of the Indo-Pacific.

Four years later, the consequences of that strategic pivot continue to reverberate across South Asia. Bangladesh, which did not figure prominently in the original AUKUS announcement, has since emerged as one of the region's most geopolitically contested states — a country the Biden administration quietly identified as a partner in its Indo-Pacific framework, and which has since moved, with striking speed, toward China in the post-Hasina transition. Understanding what Biden's Indo-Pacific strategy was, what it sought to achieve, and why Bangladesh sits at its unresolved edge is essential to reading the region's current trajectory.

The Architecture of the Indo-Pacific Strategy

The Biden administration released its formal Indo-Pacific Strategy in February 2022. The document defined the Indo-Pacific as home to more than half the world's population, accounting for 60 percent of global GDP and two-thirds of global economic growth. Its central objective was countering China's growing assertiveness — diplomatically, economically, and militarily — without triggering direct conflict. The strategy rested on four principal pillars.

The first was alliance reinvigoration. Biden upgraded the Quad — the informal security grouping of the United States, Australia, India, and Japan — from a working-level consultative body to a leaders-level forum. Quad summits produced commitments on COVID-19 vaccines (nearly 400 million doses distributed across the region), digital infrastructure investment, and clean energy cooperation. The second pillar was AUKUS — a harder security architecture designed to project naval power in a region where China was rapidly expanding its submarine fleet and asserting control over the South China Sea.

The third was economic engagement. The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), launched in May 2022 with 14 partner countries, sought to fill the vacuum left by the United States' 2017 withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Critics noted that IPEF offered no guaranteed market access — a significant limitation compared to the preferential trade agreements China had concluded across the region. The fourth was democratic governance — investing in civil society, press freedom, and anti-corruption institutions, and using multilateral forums to hold Beijing accountable on human rights.

Bangladesh in the Biden Framework: Indirect but Present

Bangladesh was not a named partner in the Quad or AUKUS. It was not in IPEF. But it was not absent from the Biden framework either. In 2023, the United States co-hosted the Indo-Pacific Business Forum with Japan, with satellite events including one in Bangladesh, launching over $100 million in new US economic initiatives. The State Department's own fact sheet on the strategy's second anniversary specifically noted US counterterrorism assistance to Bangladesh — covering crisis response, bomb disposal, judicial training, and preventing violent extremism. The United States also provided nearly $2.4 billion in humanitarian assistance for the Rohingya crisis, the single largest bilateral contribution to the response.

Washington opened a Department of Commerce Commercial Service office in Dhaka under the strategy's expanded diplomatic presence initiative. And throughout the Hasina period, the Biden administration applied consistent pressure on democratic backsliding — most notably through its decision in May 2023 to adopt a visa policy restricting entry for Bangladeshi officials who undermined the electoral process. The pressure contributed to the political environment that ultimately produced the student-led uprising of July-August 2024.

The geopolitical logic was clear. Bangladesh sits at the mouth of the Bay of Bengal, a strategic waterway connecting the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia. The country shares its longest international border with India, a core Quad partner. It hosts over one million Rohingya refugees from Myanmar — a country whose military government has deepened ties with China and Russia. And it is a major manufacturing economy — the world's second-largest garment exporter — whose supply chain integration matters to American and European firms seeking to diversify away from China. For the Biden framework, Bangladesh was a peripheral but not insignificant node.

The Post-Hasina Realignment and Washington's Slow Response

The August 2024 political transition that removed Sheikh Hasina changed Bangladesh's strategic calculus faster than Washington appeared to anticipate. Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus, heading the interim government, chose China as the destination for his first official foreign visit — a deliberate signal. The March 2025 trip to Beijing secured $2.1 billion in loans, investments, and grants. Yunus and President Xi Jinping signed eight memoranda of understanding covering infrastructure, health, manufacturing, and port modernization. The Chinese ambassador called the visit the most important by a Bangladeshi leader in fifty years. Yunus declared the relationship had entered "a new stage."

The strategic implications compounded rapidly. In October 2025, Bangladesh's interim cabinet approved the purchase of 20 Chinese J-10CE fighter jets valued at $2.2 billion — the largest single defence procurement in the country's history. Days earlier, Pakistan's Director-General Joint Staff had visited Dhaka, renewing high-level military contacts that had been frozen under Hasina for over a decade. A trilateral meeting involving China, Pakistan, and Bangladesh took place in Kunming in June 2025. Bangladesh joined the China-Pakistan-Bangladesh trilateral forum. Defence ties with Islamabad advanced to discussions on joint exercises and potential procurement of JF-17 Thunder jets.

According to The National Interest, Washington's response to this realignment was "slow-footed and lacking in strategic focus." The largest recent US-Bangladesh deals were commercial, not military: in July 2025, Bangladesh ordered 25 Boeing passenger aircraft and increased wheat and cotton imports — moves calibrated to reduce the bilateral trade deficit and lobby against US tariffs, not to anchor a security partnership.

India, the Quad, and Bangladesh's Strategic Position

Bangladesh's pivot toward China carries direct implications for India — and therefore for the Quad, whose effectiveness depends partly on India's ability to manage its immediate neighbourhood. India shares a 4,156-kilometre border with Bangladesh, its longest international boundary. Under Hasina, Dhaka maintained close security cooperation with New Delhi. After August 2024, that relationship deteriorated sharply. India refused to extradite Hasina, who took refuge in New Delhi. Bangladesh demanded the extradition; India declined. Yunus's early comments — describing Bangladesh as a potential gateway to India's northeast and a natural economic extension of China — raised acute anxieties in Indian strategic circles.

Relations between Dhaka and New Delhi reached a low point by late 2024. The Indian Army chief publicly stated that normalisation of ties hinged on Bangladesh holding elections. New Delhi initially refused Yunus's requests for a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Modi, relenting only in April 2025 on the sidelines of a summit in Bangkok. The International Crisis Group, in a December 2025 report, documented the depth of Indian frustration — and the risk that continued estrangement would drive Dhaka further into Beijing's orbit.

For the United States, which has invested heavily in the US-India partnership as a cornerstone of Indo-Pacific strategy, Bangladesh's drift poses a specific problem. Washington cannot easily manage Bangladesh bilaterally without navigating India's sensitivities. And India's own anxieties about the Yunus government — some Indian officials circulate conspiracy theories about US involvement in Hasina's removal — complicate the triangular relationship that any effective Indo-Pacific policy in South Asia requires.

The Trump Transition and the Strategy's Uncertain Legacy

The Biden Indo-Pacific Strategy formally ended with the administration on January 20, 2025. The Trump administration that succeeded it has approached the region differently — prioritising bilateral transactional deals and showing less enthusiasm for multilateral security architectures. AUKUS remains in place as a treaty commitment, but the Quad's future trajectory under Trump is less certain. The IPEF, already criticised for lacking market access provisions, faces further uncertainty.

For Bangladesh, the Trump transition has created a specific opening and a specific risk. The opening: an administration that prioritises trade over human rights pressure gives Dhaka room to court Washington on economic terms — the Boeing deal and wheat purchases are precisely this kind of transactional diplomacy. The risk: without the consistent democracy and governance pressure that the Biden framework maintained, the conditions that produce political accountability in Bangladesh's fragile transitional period are weakened. The Atlantic Council noted that the interim government is hoping Trump will "see Bangladesh on its own terms, not as India's junior partner" — a reading of US interests that may or may not survive contact with Washington's actual strategic priorities.

What the AUKUS Moment Revealed About South Asia's Future

The AUKUS announcement in September 2021 was primarily about the Pacific — about submarines, sea lanes, and the military balance in the Western Pacific. But its logic extended to South Asia in a less obvious way. By demonstrating that the United States was willing to restructure alliances, absorb diplomatic costs, and make generational security investments to contest China's regional dominance, AUKUS signalled that the Indo-Pacific competition would be sustained, not episodic.

Bangladesh's current realignment is taking place within that sustained competition. Dhaka is not a passive actor — its interim government has made calculated choices to diversify defence relationships, court Chinese investment, and rebuild ties with Pakistan. Whether this represents a permanent strategic reorientation or a transitional hedge depends partly on what external powers — the United States, India, China — offer and demand. Bangladesh's geography, economy, and population make it too significant to be peripheral to any serious Indo-Pacific framework. What the post-Biden period has not yet produced is a coherent American strategy for South Asia that matches the ambition of the 2022 Indo-Pacific document with the presence and resources needed to make it credible.

The AUKUS moment upset France. The longer-term question is whether Washington's Indo-Pacific strategy, in its various iterations, can prevent the Bay of Bengal from quietly slipping out of the framework it was designed to shape.