American Policy towards the Bangladesh Liberation War: A Brief Review

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to analyze the United States of America’s policy towards the liberation war of Bangladesh during 1971. For doing that, this paper mainly focuses on the policy approach applied by the then two most powerful diplomats, President Richard M. Nixon and his National Security Advisor Henry A. Kissinger, of the United States of America. The information used in this paper largely comes from the documents of two volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series published by the US State Department. It was found that the Americans’ influence was very pro-Pakistani and against the split of East Pakistan because they did not want the birth of another independent state in the Soviet Union sphere. However, it failed to produce any impact on the emergence of Bangladesh as an independent state other than creating panic for a while and prolonging the war of liberation for a couple of days.