You’re right in that Bangladesh doesn’t have the luxury to tell China or Saudi Arabia off for their human rights violation. But who’s suggesting that anyway? I think the relevance of McCain’s stated position for us is not we conduct our foreign policy this way. Rather, the relevance is that Uncle Sam should ignore our leaders — democratically elected or militarily imposed — when they say ‘forget about our dirty little human rights violations such as torture/remand/crossfire, we are keeping you safe from those scary people with beard’, because the human rights violations in our country rarely have anything to do with the fight against extremism, and more to do with preservation of power for the government of the day.

McCain himself fell for this ruse in the past. We need to hold US to its ideals and not allow that to happen again.

What’s McCain’s policy prescription anyway? We should not stop dealing with these regimes, but we should not stop criticising them either. To me, that sounds like classic realism + frosting and cherry on top. If it walks like realism and talks like realism…

Only the US can afford to do that most of the times, because everyone wants to deal with the Americans. (Even then, many argue that Bush’s naming of Iran as a “rogue state” in his state of the union speech put America in a significant disadvantage in Iraq.) If anyone thinks Bangladesh can carry out its foreign policy the same way, they have another thought coming.