Ye Myo Hein and Lucas Myers
Ever since the Burmese military seized power in a coup in early 2021, the country has been caught in a deadly tailspin. What began as peaceful mass protest against the junta flared into armed resistance, with much of the country descending into renewed civil war. The conflict has since turned into a protracted insurgency, with newer pro-democracy forces fighting alongside ethnic armed groups that have battled central authorities for decades. Amid growing signs of a strategic stalemate, both the junta and the resistance appear determined to fight on. Neighboring states have tried to mediate, but a negotiated peace is not in sight.
For much of the last two years, the Burmese crisis received minimal attention from the United States and China, despite unfolding at a time of intensifying great-power tensions. Washington and its partners have voiced support for Myanmar’s pro-democracy faction, yet geopolitical considerations have limited their willingness to take forceful action against the junta. Although Beijing favors the military dictatorship in some respects, it initially opted to wait and see, too.
But this great-power restraint is now breaking down. Misperceiving several developments as indications that the antiregime forces are American proxies, Beijing is moving with increasing determination to shore up the junta. The result is what one might call Cold War–ization: the civil war is attracting outside meddling by great-power rivals, each fearing that inaction would benefit the other side.
This puts other countries in the region, particularly those in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, in a bind. One of ASEAN’s core tenets has been that it should not be forced to choose between the United States and China. Instead, the group values maintaining good relations with both great powers. But as Myanmar’s civil war takes on aspects of a Cold War proxy conflict—a situation brought on in part by the unwillingness of governments in the region to unite against the junta early on—the country’s neighbors may soon face that exact choice: not just between a junta and a pro-democracy resistance but between China and the United States. For Washington and its allies, meanwhile, the entrenchment of a military junta beholden to China would portend diminished influence and greater instability throughout Southeast Asia.
A RENEWED CIVIL WAR
The February 2021 coup set Myanmar on a path to conflict and devastation. The putschists enjoyed scarce support among the population, which rallied behind deposed leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in peaceful protest. Members of the ousted government banded together with several other political and ethnic groups to proclaim a civilian National Unity Government to restore democracy. The military’s answer was to unleash relentless and often indiscriminate violence on its opponents.
By the spring of 2021, Myanmar was careening toward a renewed civil war, with opponents of the military dictatorship taking up arms and vowing to fight back rather than retreat. The resistance found allies among the country’s almost two dozen ethnic armed groups—organizations located along Myanmar’s periphery, some with close economic and political ties to neighboring China, that have fought for increased autonomy or outright independence ever since Myanmar’s founding in 1948.
Although facing a ruthless and better-equipped adversary, the pro-democracy and ethnic armed groups quickly gained a foothold in many rural areas, especially along the country’s borders with India, China, and Thailand. As early as mid-2021, the junta’s leader, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, conceded that his forces did not control the entire country. They have since held their ground in the countryside but have struggled to take cities and towns, in part because they are outgunned by the regime’s heavy artillery and at the mercy of its air force. As of late spring 2023, the two parties appear to have reached a strategic stalemate.
DOUBLE GAMES
The United States’ approach to post-coup Myanmar has consisted of a cautious and pragmatic balancing act between values and interests. Washington opposes the junta, yet it is also wary of alienating its allies and partners in the region, some of whom have maintained engagement with the Burmese military since the coup.
High-level U.S. officials have met with Burmese opposition resistance leaders, and the U.S. government has issued targeted sanctions against high-ranking military officials. But the sanctions have left untouched the junta’s most prized asset: Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise, a military-owned firm that generates some $1.5 billion in annual revenues and offers the regime much-needed access to foreign currency. Washington has also refrained from imposing secondary sanctions on those who do business with the junta, such as Thai energy companies and Singaporean financial firms.
This restraint on the part of the United States is likely meant to placate other countries in the region, particularly Thailand, whose government—itself brought to power in a coup in 2014—remains supportive of the Burmese junta and maintains close economic ties to the regime. Important U.S. allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific, such as Australia, India, and Japan, have voiced their “concern” about the Burmese crisis but fear that excessive pressure would open the regime to greater Chinese influence. As a result, they have maintained or, in the case of India, expanded their economic and diplomatic ties to the junta and are unlikely to provide support to the Burmese resistance.
Not unlike the United States, China has viewed the chaos in Myanmar with ambivalence. Beijing enjoyed good relations with Aung San Suu Kyi’s government before its overthrow. From the Chinese perspective, the outbreak of a civil war next door—China and Myanmar share a 1,300-mile border—was bad news for regional stability and for China’s multibillion-dollar investments in Myanmar under the Belt and Road Initiative. China was and remains one of the Burmese military’s leading arms suppliers, but it has never quite trusted the military’s leadership, which it views as too unpredictable. Beijing also supports some of Myanmar’s ethnic armed groups, including by acquiescing to an underground cross-border arms trade.
For this and other reasons, leaders in Beijing opted to hedge their bets in the aftermath of the coup. Although they never denounced the junta or explicitly called for a return to civilian rule, they opened a backchannel to the National Unity Government and pressured the regime not to dissolve Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, the National League for Democracy. When fighting between the junta and an ethnic armed group led to the accidental shelling of a Chinese border town, Beijing reportedly warned the junta that another such incident would draw “the necessary response.” Chinese leaders also kept the ruling generals at arm’s length. When Wang Yi, then the Chinese foreign minister, visited Myanmar in the summer of 2022, he declined to meet with Min Aung Hlaing, the junta’s leader, a move that was seen at the time as a major diplomatic snub.
CHINA GOES ON THE OFFENSIVE
The complex array of American and Chinese interests at play in Myanmar allowed the country to mostly avoid the gravity well of U.S.-Chinese competition, at least for a while. The warring parties on the ground may view their fight as part of a global struggle between democracy and autocracy, a fact most evident in the resistance’s vocal support for Ukraine and the junta’s Russian sympathies. But the same has not been true of Washington and Beijing, for whom the civil war has been an exercise in balancing and hedging, not in proxy warfare. In September 2021, the United States and China even collaborated to block the junta from taking over Myanmar’s seat at the United Nations.
Things have taken a turn for the worse over the past year, however, as Beijing has abandoned its initial caution and embraced the junta. Driving this shift is China’s perception that the United States has itself changed course and that Washington now fully supports—and is solidifying its influence over—the pro-democracy resistance. Two developments in particular have triggered Beijing: new U.S. legislation on Myanmar and last year’s decision by the National Unity Government to open an office in Washington.
In truth, neither step signals a meaningful shift in U.S. policy. The law in question, the 2023 BURMA Act, reiterates Washington’s goal of reversing the coup and calls for the provision of nonlethal military aid (mostly communications equipment) to antiregime forces. Yet the law mandates neither lethal military support nor sanctions on the junta’s oil and gas business, and even the disbursement of nonlethal aid has lagged. U.S. efforts on behalf of Myanmar’s rebels are negligible—practically nonexistent—in comparison with the support the United States is providing to Ukraine, for instance, in its war against Russia. As for the National Unity Government’s new office in the U.S. capital, its goal is to coordinate and amplify the resistance’s advocacy, but whether it succeeds in this task is another question.
These caveats notwithstanding, Beijing’s reaction has been to throw its weight more forcefully behind the junta, ending two years of relative disengagement. In May, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang met with Min Aung Hlaing, declaring that China would help Myanmar “achieve reconciliation under the constitutional and legal framework”—diplomatic code for supporting the military regime. Earlier this year, the junta banned Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, which it would likely not have done without feeling that it had Beijing’s assent. According to insiders, Chinese interlocutors have also urged the pro-democracy resistance not to grow too close with the West.
Beijing’s new special envoy to Myanmar, Deng Xijun, has gone on the offensive, too. In recent months, Deng has held a flurry of meetings with junta leaders and representatives of several ethnic armed groups and is reportedly pushing for cease-fires between these parties. That outcome would benefit the regime and hobble the resistance: a truce with Chinese-aligned ethnic armed groups would drive a wedge between them and their pro-democracy allies, whose fighters rely on the ethnic armed groups for training, manpower, and equipment (a large portion of which is of Chinese origin or is built using Chinese-made parts. The regime, on the other hand, would be fighting on fewer fronts at once and could redeploy its soldiers to the most important hot spots. The result would be an emboldened junta, confident of its chances for survival and willing to fight on.
GET OFF THE FENCE
China’s newfound interest and engagement in Myanmar brings to mind Cold War–era conflicts in Southeast Asia, such as wars in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Then as now, rival domestic factions curried favor with and sought support from rivaling superpowers—which were often receptive to these efforts, driven by a fear that the other side would otherwise gain a leg up.
Myanmar today is no exception. Competition between China and its rivals—above all, the United States and India—is reshaping domestic politics in many countries in the Indo-Pacific as local actors feel compelled to pick sides. The Maldives and Sri Lanka have for years been caught in a geopolitical push and pull between India and China. The question of Chinese influence, and of embracing or rejecting China’s growing regional ambitions, has become a political lightning rod elsewhere in South Asia, parts of Southeast Asia, and Oceania. But the stakes are particularly high in an armed conflict such as Myanmar’s, where China’s growing involvement risks prolonged suffering and additional great-power tensions.
Given the state of U.S.-Chinese relations and the ideological dimension of Myanmar’s civil war, it was perhaps inevitable that the warring parties would become entangled in broader geopolitical rivalries. But substantial culpability lies with regional actors who have long since abdicated responsibility and thereby ceded the playing field to Beijing. ASEAN has performed especially poorly. Owing to the bloc’s focus on consensus building and noninterference, it has proven incapable of exerting any serious pressure on the junta. Its flagship diplomatic initiative in the conflict, an unworkable 2021 agreement known as the Five-Point Consensus, quickly lost steam because it lacked enforcement mechanisms. Meek attempts at backdoor diplomacy by the Indonesian government, which currently chairs ASEAN, have failed to make progress, too. Meanwhile, several autocratic ASEAN member states appear eager to rehabilitate the junta within the organization, including Thailand and Laos, which is set to assume the role of chair for 2024.
Instead of endless dithering and talk of engaging “all stakeholders,” ASEAN members and other countries in the region should face the facts. First, the Burmese military is the structural and proximate cause for the violence that has repeatedly engulfed Myanmar for three-quarters of a century. Second, the military is incapable of achieving battlefield victory, as evidenced by its failure to consolidate control over rural areas, defeat the ethnic armed groups, and suppress popular resistance despite its overwhelmingly superior firepower. Its removal from power is the only realistic option for achieving long-term peace in the country. The diplomatic efforts of ASEAN and other states should reflect that reality. ASEAN could learn from the African Union, which in 2019 suspended Sudan for its military’s failure to hand over power to civilians.
Washington should try to coordinate its Myanmar policy with Beijing.
Finally, ASEAN will risk obsolescence if it sticks to seeking cooperation and striving to accommodate both great powers. This approach is already proving ineffective in the South China Sea in the face of aggressive Chinese territorial expansion. In Myanmar, ASEAN needs to make some hard choices and get off the fence. China’s diplomatic efforts to shore up the junta, if successful, will only drag out the conflict and consolidate a regime beholden to China’s revisionist geopolitical goals. That outcome, in turn, would likely portend greater pressure on other states in the region to align with either Washington or Beijing—an outcome that no one within ASEAN wants.
The United States, for its part, should understand that it can no longer dismiss Myanmar as strategically unimportant. Given the country’s location at the meeting point of South Asia and Southeast Asia, a stable Myanmar is essential for stability in the region at large. As a first step, the United States should turn more attention to Myanmar, as it pledged to do in the BURMA Act, and persuade its allies and partners to align their policies.
Yet the U.S. government should not view the civil war as a zero-sum competition with China, whose geographic proximity to and major interests in Myanmar make it a necessary part of any settlement. On the contrary, Washington should try to coordinate its Myanmar policy with Beijing, if only to build the necessary guardrails to preclude escalation. U.S. officials should make their case by appealing to the pragmatism of Chinese leaders: The United States and China’s shared interest in regional stability means the junta must go. And since the junta will consider a peaceful negotiated settlement only if it sees no path to military victory, U.S. assistance to the resistance forces under the BURMA Act is not a threat to China but is instead in line with Beijing’s own goals. Moreover, Beijing should be well aware that the junta’s complete lack of popular support makes it a risky long-term partner.
For Southeast Asian states, keeping Cold War dynamics from fracturing the region should be a paramount concern, one that takes precedence over increasingly unworkable norms around noninterference and consensus. Recent moves by Thailand to rehabilitate the junta are the exact wrong approach, giving the regime a false sense that it can hold on to power. Instead, ASEAN’s interest in regional stability points to one solution only: removing Myanmar’s main destabilizing agent, the junta, from power.
No comments:
Post a Comment